By Ashish Dwivedi Here, you’ll find an unbiased comparison between two of the best Email Marketing tools. Both MailChimp and Drip are powerful tools to leverage email marketing for generating leads and building a brand identity. The two comprised some amazing features and many top firms around the world use these to harness the power of email marketing. But, it gives rise to the question, which one is better? In this Mailchimp vs Drip faceoff, we’re going to breakdown and compare the features of both marketing automation software.
Drip as well as Mailchimp have their fair share of the customer in the current market. Topmost firms and organizations of the world like Indian Motorcycles, Universal Audio, Columbia University, TED, etc trust these platforms for creating and implementing email marketing strategies. Before highlighting the contrast between Mailchimp and Drip, let us give you an overview of both of these platforms.
What is Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is a renowned name in the email marketing world. Many small, as well as large enterprises, use this platform for fulfilling their purposes for about 2 decades now. People opt for this platform because it’s an easy to use and reliable platform. Primarily, amateur bloggers and small eCommerce prefer this platform to reach their desired audience. Now, irrespective of the size, Mailchimp software is the first choice of most businesses.
What is Drip?
Relatively, Drip is a new and also slightly advanced marketing platform than Mailchimp. It was released back in 2018 and since then, the platform has witnessed a meteoric rise. As of now, more than 27,000 marketers use this email marketing software. Some of the key reasons due to which clients are in favor of this platform are increased customer retention and acquisition rate, improved loyalty, and brand building.
The market share of Mailchimp is 69.58% on the other hand Drip only holds less than 1% of the total market share of email marketing software. However, the growth rate of Drip is enormous. According to the annual report of Mailchimp, a whopping amount of 333,635,013,935 emails was sent by the Mailchimp customer in the year 2020 only.
Mailchimp vs Drip: In-Depth Feature Comparison
Let’s analyze the key differences between the features and functionalities of these marketing automation platforms one by one. In the end, we’ll give you our final verdict on which one of the best email marketing tools among both.
User Interface/User Experience
Mailchimp: The user interface or UI provides you access to most of the features quite easily. After releasing frequent updates, Mailchimp has made it easy to navigate throughout the software fluently. Yet, some feel the design of the portal still has retro vibes.
Drip: Being modern and newly launched when compared to Mailchimp, Drip has a more sleek and fluid UI. The user can glide over the feature without any obstruction. On top of that, amazing visuals and a feature fetched menu bar at the top makes all features accessible from one place.
Winner: MailChimp vs Drip! Who comes on top? Clearly, the winner is Drip by miles. The modern and sophisticated design of the dashboard and portal gives it a more effortless UI, which leads to an unparalleled User experience.
Email Campaigns
Mailchimp: There are three ways through which you can run the email campaigns in Mailchimp namely Regular, Automated, and Plain-Text.
In the Regular campaign, the users will be asked for a Campaign Name, Recipient Name, Subject line, and Email Content. After that, you need to choose a design from a bunch of templates.
In Automated campaigns, emails will be automatically sent to the customers depending on preset criteria and actions.
In Plain-Text campaigns, if you don’t find any preformatted templates interesting then you can use the plain-text for email drip campaigns. You can save your own designed email as a template, in case you want to use it again in near future.
Drip: In Drip, you can send emails to customers either by using a Campaign or by a Broadcast. Let’s see how both of these works and what other additional features they have to offer.
Campaigns option of Drip is very practical for sending frequent emails after preset time gaps. In addition to this, Drip’s campaign can automatically trigger after some activities of users like checkout, add to cart, return, and even simple window shopping.
In Broadcast, the users can send emails one by one to their customers. It is quite useful for sending newsletters, product announcements, etc. Drip may not have lavish templates like Mailchimp does, but its Global Style feature can do it all easily.
Advanced features like Expiring URLs and Liquid Templating makes it outstanding from other marketing tools.
Winner: Again, Drip managed to get an upper hand on Mailchimp with the help of its more unique and practical features like Delay between emails, liquid templating, expiring URLs, etc.
Do you know? Every $1 spent on email marketing can deliver an astounding return of $42. This is some serious ROI (Return on Investment). But, this can only be achieved by an effective and proper email marketing strategy.
Integration with other Platforms
Mailchimp: Mailchimp is capable of integrating with more than 250 applications. No matter if it’s a telecommunication software like LiveChat or payment gateway apps like Stripe, Mailchimp can integrate with all of them.
But if you’re a SuiteCRM user then you’ll be required to have an extension called SuiteCRM Mailchimp Integration plugin. This will provide the users with the functionality of both Mailchimp as well as SuiteCRM.
Drip: Drip can integrate with up to 99 different platforms which include some of the top social media, ecommerce platform, (Content Management System) CMS and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), etc. Drip allows seamless integration with cs-cart, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify without any issue..
However, it doesn’t provide integration with SuiteCRM, which is also one of the most used open-source CRM software in the world. For this purpose, you can use the SuiteCRM Email Drip Campaign plugin. This extension will enable you to run drip email campaigns in SuiteCRM easily.
Winner: Mailchimp has emerged as a clear winner here. It’s due to the fact that it can integrate with more than twice the number of applications that Drip does.
Subscriber’s List Management
Mailchimp: You can create a segment of audiences to whom you want to target with email marketing. The list management feature decides how efficient and effective your email campaign strategy is going to be.
You can do this from the Audience section. Here you can choose one or multiple tags at once like Date Added, Purchase Activity, etc. After that, you can preview this segment and see all the audience who matched the entered conditions. You can also save this so that you can run an email campaign on the targeted audience.
However, there is a major drawback here. Mailchimp doesn’t have an automatic Email Pruning feature i.e. you need to filter the inactive subscribers and then manually delete all of them. This could prove to be a time-consuming task.
Drip: Just like Mailchimp, you’ll also get tags, subscribers, and a segment option is Drip as well. Besides that, the user will be able to apply tags automatically which saves a whole lot of time. In Drip, you’ll get many different types of conditions to add.
Email Pruning feature is also available in Drip. Based on different conditions and filters, the users can delete the inactive subscribers from the software easily.
Winner: You must’ve guessed this one, Drip has won this round due to the availability of its Email Pruning feature. If used well then it can increase the effectiveness of your email campaign. This MailChimp vs Drip faceoff is getting pretty exciting, isn’t it?
Landing Pages and Forms
Mailchimp: This has to offer you both landing pages as well as forms. Using Mailchimp, you can customize (Build, Design, & Translate) the forms to a great extent. For example, you can add and remove fields, make them mandatory, etc.
Based on the type of audience, you can choose any one of the preinstalled landing page templates. You can create a landing page from scratch by adding blocks for text or images as you like. All the subscribers who choose to opt-in will be automatically added to the list even before the creation of landing pages starts.
Drip: In terms of forms, the features of Mailchimp and Drip are quite similar. Here, you can also modify the form’s settings as per your requirements. There is an option to display this form as a widget, embedded widget, or a pop-up.
When it comes to landing pages in Drip, there is nothing much you can do about it. You’ll be required to install a third-party page builder.
Winner: Drip lacks the ability to create customizable landing pages without external assistance. On the other hand, Mailchimp consists of attractive landing page templates due to which it ends up as a winner.
Statistics revealed by Hubspot suggest that if a company increased their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 they can witness a 55% increment in leads as well. So, clearly landing pages are an important factor and no one should overlook this.
Pricing and Plans
Mailchimp
Drip
Winner: As Mailchimp provides a free beginner plan for those who just start using email marketing, therefore, it emerged as a winner when it comes to affordable prices and plans.
The Final Verdict
As we can clearly see, both of the software has advanced features in abundance. In a few aspects, Drip came on top while in others Mailchimp was an outperformer. At last, it comes to individual preferences. If you want advanced features alongside sleek UI/UX then Drip should be the one to go with. However, if you’re just a beginner and looking for an email marketing tool that can easily integrate with your other software as well then Mailchimp should be your first choice. We hope, now we have finally settled the debate of Mailchimp vs Drip.
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