Active Campaign vs. Drip

Are you looking to replace your old-fashioned autoresponder with something more modern? If this is you, then you really need to compare Active Campaign vs Drip. These are two of the leading autoresponders in the market today.

Both platforms are cutting edge and offer incredible options to improve deliverability and open rates and they both allow you to create superb automations (with visual drag and drop sequences) to customize the message your subscriber receives. This makes each person on your list feel special because their experience is unique.

Introduction to Active Campaign

Active Campaign is a powerful marketing platform (with SMS capabilities), email marketing software, CRM, and a complete sales solution. It is a solution that was designed to take email marketing to a whole new level as it makes it easier for you to generate leads, segment your customers, manage your CRM, as well as develop personalized workflows.

Who Is It Ideal for?

This is an all-inclusive email marketing automation tool for use by SaaS, bloggers, marketing agencies, marketers, and small e-commerce stores. Some items to consider:

$15 per month starting price
No setup fee
Unlimited emails
Smooth integration with e-commerce platforms provided by third parties
Full marketing automation
Adding new users will cost you money
Thirty-day money back policy
The Lite plan comes with a great set of features

You have probably come across this saying “the money is in your list”. What this means is that the way you connect, engage, and segment with your list is very important. An inactive email list will not help you generate any income. For you to make money from your lists, you need to be smart and innovative.

This means being able to choose the best email marketing software. It is something that all marketing agencies and smart marketers have to do before they get started.

Introduction to Drip

Drip, like Active Campaign, is an e-commerce CRM platform which makes it possible for you to send your customers emails that have been highly personalized. With Drip, you can expect to receive full automation that includes integrations with hundreds of email personalization, tracking, services, applications, and many more features.

Who Is Drip Intended for?

Drip can be described as a very powerful CRM that is best suited for use by small business enterprises or organizations that are involved in the online sale of digital or physical products. Its features include:

Free for up to one hundred contacts
Unlimited emails
Refunds are available
Unlimited users
No setup fee
Supports automated workflows
It is a one-in-all marketing automation tool
Multichannel marketing
It comes with prebuilt campaigns for you

When looking at active campaign vs drip, it is important to understand that both products have been designed as e-commerce CRM (customer relationship management) platforms. They are also known as ECRMs. These are more than your normal email marketing softwares as they come with additional tools that are required to place your entire customer management and marketing functions on autopilot.
The tools have been designed for use by e-commerce stores, bloggers, marketers, and small businesses that regularly sell products online, be physical or digital goods.

So which tool is the best for your business? Which tool should you consider getting based on your existing marketing, business model, vertical, and industry requirements?

In this guide, we are going to look at drip vs active campaign. We will conduct a side-by-side analysis of the two tools to determine the best tool for your business.

Features

Active Campaign and Drip are very similar tools, and the two have been primarily designed for email marketing automation. Both tools have overlapping features. It is important to keep in mind that the process of shifting from one tool to another is often very messy, and will in many cases prove to be too troublesome. To avoid such hiccups, it will be best to make sure that you get to choose the right automation tool from the start!

Welcome to the world of Email Marketing Automation…

Drip is a user-friendly, sales-focused email marketing automation solution which makes it possible for you to easily send targeted emails. These are emails that can help boost your existing click-through and email open rates. On installation, you will find that the developers have provided an easy automation tool that helps make life much easier for you.

Drip stands out from all the other available email marketing solutions due to its ready to use automation workflows as well as the presence of its pre-made workflows.
Prebuilt campaigns also help the solution standout as it makes it possible for any e-commerce store to kick-start an email marketing campaign at the single click of a button.
Content customization helps you enhance your personalization. With it, a user is able to add dynamic subscriber data into the email campaigns to help boost audience engagement.

Its main focus is centered on a user’s ability to send highly personalized emails to multiple subscribers.

Active Campaign is not very different from Drip when it comes to workflows, personalization, and email marketing automation features. A user is able to generate workflows that can be used to send emails automatically to all the subscribers on the emailing list based on variables such as activity level and engagement.

It comes with a very powerful tracking feature. The feature helps log all the subscribers that have interacted with your website in one way or another.

The CRM tool from Active Campaign assists with lead generation, email integration, marketing, automation, and nurturing sales. A marketer or blogger is, therefore, in a position to create custom sales processes which make it possible for them to send targeted emails to all their subscribers from the very first day.
Users can use lead scoring to assist in assigning scores to all their leads based on the kind of interaction that they have had with their website and emails. This can help you generate more income by sending the right offers to the right customers at the most opportune time.
One of its standout features happens to be the pre-built email templates and workflows. It also comes with an easy to drag and drop email builder.
As is the case with Drip, Active Campaign also allows you to provide dynamic content.

Landing Pages

For landing pages, you will still need to seek other third-party tools, such as clickfunnels because these Active Campaign and Drip are for email and content delivery, not building opt-in pages.

Pricing

Pricing always helps make things much simpler especially when you are faced with an impossible decision regarding the drip vs active campaign solutions.

Drip

This solution provides four main pricing plans. These are:

Starter—ideal for 0-100 subscribers. It is completely free of charge and is highly recommended for beginners. If you recently went into business and currently have no customers, this will be your ideal solution. Use it to gradually grow your business. You also get to send unlimited emails to your contacts.
Basic—can be used by businesses or marketers who have between 1-2500 subscribers. It is priced at $49 per month.
Pro—ideal for 2501-5000 subscribers. It has been priced at $99 per month.
Enterprise—recommended for agencies with more than 5000 subscribers. Its pricing options can be customized based on the client’s needs.

Active Campaign

As is the case with Drip, Active Campaign also comes with four pricing options (starting at $15/mo for up to 500 contacts under the Lite plan). With Active Campaign, you will find that there is no free plan. However, each plan comes with a trial period of fourteen days. In addition, the price of your plan will be determined by the total number of contacts in your emailing list. For example,

If you have a total of 1,000 contacts, and you choose Lite, it is priced at $29 per month billing ($17/mo if you choose annual billing). With this plan, you will get to send unlimited emails, marketing automation, an email marketing solution, and the plan can be used by three people. It just doesn’t include SMS messaging but this is a great plan to have.
If you want access to additional features, consider purchasing Plus plan. It is priced at $70 dollars for 1,000 contacts. This price applies for monthly billing (annual billing is a $49 per month fee). If you have more than 1,000 contacts, the price goes to $125/mo for up to 2,500 contacts and $169/mo for up to 5,000 contacts on the monthly plan.
Marketers who need access to attribution, site messenger and have many users should consider switching to Professional. It is priced at $159 per month with annual billing being priced at $129 per month (for up to 2,500 contacts).
The Enterprise plan is inclusive of everything that is in the professional plan. It also comes with additional features such as custom mail server domain, free design service, onboarding, and a dedicated account manager. The plan starts at $279 per month and $229 per month for annual billing (for up to 2,500 contacts).

If you have more contacts, that’s no problem, but the price will be higher for these plans.

Active Campaign

Pros
• Ideal for both sellers and non-sellers
• Can be integrated with hundreds of third-party applications
• Its tracking snippet is quite handy
Cons
• Sensitivity to SPAM complaints, although they will work with you as a marketer to help resolve any issues

Drip

Pros
• Has an intuitive CRM
• Can be used with leading e-commerce platforms
• Beginner-friendly

Cons
• It is not as useful if you are not an online retailer