Drip

As of January 2018, Drip pivoted to be a dedicated Ecommerce CRM, or eCRM, if you will.

The core of their marketing automation is currently in Email, but they also integrate with Facebook ads, and multiple sales and project management tools to extend automation. And they are moving fast into other channels like SMS.

As with any good email marketing software, you can setup product page abandonment and cart abandonment sequences, as well as dozens of other common sequences customized to the users browsing history.

I really love the design of the product overall. Easily one of the best designed CRM or marketing automation platforms on the market. One of the biggest moments where design comes in handy is in the view of an individual customer journey. They make it easy to understand sessions, emails, and purchase behavior in a chronological order. You tell me, which one or two emails do you think most likely contributed to a sale in this timeline.

You can also easily add tags and custom fields for easy database management, segmentation, and marketing automation.

And Drip has the ability to calculate lead score - which can be used as an indicator of brand affinity - something you can use to segment your best customers, new customers, customers likely to churn, if you're a subscription, etc.

Drips main impact is going to be in revenue generated from email marketing, but their CRM extends far behind email marketing, to be a holder of all data, which can be used in multiple different ways, most easily through Facebook and Instagram advertising, lookalike audience creation, and better ad segmentation overall.

Typically its your marketing manager or head of marketing that is going to be in this tool on a regular basis. For early stage companies, that's also the business owner. As time goes on, you might have one person fully dedicated to email marketing and marketing automation, and maybe even have a second in here for data analytics and customer journey identification and segmentation.

You'll want to import your database and connect your Shopify integration before anything else. Then your setup is all about creating the flows you need to drive revenue. Onboarding, Abandon Product, Abandon Cart, Abandon Checkout, Post-Purchase, and Retention or Win-back automation. You'll want to coincide these with other channel marketing activities as well, like SMS, push, Messenger, or advertising.

Setup can take quite a while if you are not importing from another provider, really you can get lost for days inside any CRM or email marketing platform.

You need an email marketing platform from day 1 and everyone needs one. You'll want a tool like Drip even more when you are collecting additional customer data, studying customer journey's, or building advanced email marketing automation flows.

There's no clear reason not to use Drip. They have all the features needed to be a full-fledged CRM and marketing automation platform, it simply depends on the needs for your business. They can serve small to large Ecommerce stores and they fit in fine with every vertical.