Drip Review – The Affiliate Marketing perspective

We wrote a Drip Review because most online marketing software are built for digital marketers promoting their own products or services. As an affiliate, you are by definition an “online marketer”, but your marketing software needs are quite different. As such, you have probably been lured more than once into trying a new software, to realize after a few moments, that the software is not right for you and that you will need to either use the software in an awkward way or move on to the next free trial. We wrote the Drip review to highlight those needs so you don’t have to go through the process yourself.

After many failed free trials, you are now acquainted with the process of digging dip into software reviews and software documentation to find out if they are suitable for the affiliate marketing needs. Very often, they are not.

What is the affiliate marketing perspective?

As an affiliate marketer, your main task is to promote products and services that are not yours. It means that you are not in charge of the most crucial part of the conversion journey: The transaction.

While you can build the most sophisticated sales funnel and design an amazing landing page, you know that after you’ve convinced the visitor to click on the Call to Action, you are no longer in charge and whatever comes next is up to the affiliate program and ultimately the merchant itself. In this Drip review, you will learn what are the true advantages granted by the Drip software when its integrated with TrackingDesk.

Drip Review

We first noticed Drip when it was acquired by the landing page builder LeadPages. Their great selling point was the funnel and automation visualization feature. As a marketer, I often fall back to a simple piece of paper or whiteboard, to figure out or plan a marketing campaign. So having the option to take a step back to look at a marketing flow and make adjustments, is priceless. For that, Drip has done an amazing job by providing a simple, intuitive and powerful automation builder.

Marketing and Sales Automation

It is unquestionable that marketing automation is an absolute “must have” feature for any marketing activity. The automation allows you to plan short and long-term marketing activities such as emails, SMS, reminders, website pop, according to user’s actions or stages in the sales funnel.

Nothing new here. All Marketing and Sales automation software do that.

What sets Drip apart from the pack?

Drip has a very powerful API which allows you to post-click data back to Drip and associates this data to the subscriber.

(Relax, you are not going to learn to code and work on their API)

In a nutshell, you send an email campaign and John Smith signed up for a magazine subscription.

Here is what follows:

Conversion Event:

  • Event Meta Data
    • Event type: Purchase
    • Event name: GQ Magazine
    • Event Value: 10
    • Event Currency: USD

Now, since you are not the merchant, you are probably wondering how you are going to get this information back to Drip. And you are right!

For those who have already figured that you can send such data via the  Postback URL, you can skip the next paragraph.

The (Web)Hook:

When combining the power of Drip and TrackingDesk, you have the ability to send via Webhook, these conversions events through the Drip API.

What you need to do is fairly simple:

You configure Drip as a Traffic Source in TrackingDesk and you set a webhook as a Postback URL. From this point on, every conversion generated by campaigns running from Drip through TrackingDesk will fire the Postback URL which will update Drip subscriber with the conversion event Data.

Data-Driven Marketing 

Since you can update in real time the subscriber’s actions, you have now the ability to configure your marketing automation rules and play with your subscribers with real data. If you’ve read our previous posts about Data-Driven Marketing, you will understand how important it can be for your campaign performances.

Drip as “drip campaigns”: 

Your campaigns normally involve several messages sent to your subscribers, with the aim to make them purchase or subscribe to an offer. Now that you have actual conversion metrics back to Drip, you can trigger certain actions that will be contextually relevant to the subscriber.

For example: When subscriber John Smith bought the GQ Magazine subscription, he is being tagged and moved to another drip campaign which will try to sell him a subscription to a Gym Club.

Naturally, this is just an example, but I am sure your imagination is already moving at a fast pace. Yes, possibilities are endless, since you have all this data to play with. What you could simply not remotely think about a while ago, can now be done, in a fairly easy manner.

What you see is what you get:

  • Know where each of your subscribers is in the funnel
  • Subscriber lifetime value
  • Your campaign’s performances – Real performances.
  • AB testing messages
  • Subscriber’s buying patterns and preferences

Other notable features:

  • Landing pages AB testing
  • Customizable web forms
  • Broadcast campaigns
  • Integrations with various carts and processing companies
  • Link triggers – Activate campaigns when users click on certain campaign links
  • Webhooks (fire conversions back to TrackingDesk if you sell your own products)

There are more features that we could have added to the Drip review, but what really empowers affiliate marketers, is the ability to send conversion data to Drip, as it simply expands your marketing horizon.

Price 

You can try their platform for Free and you will automatically be charged according to the number of subscribers. Starting at $41 up to $83 for up to 5000 subscribers. Pretty much the same price as MailChimp.

Try Drip For Free

Combining the power of TrackingDesk with Drip marketing automation platform, opens the door to new marketing horizons and gives you additional control over your marketing.

Check out their site here

Drip Integration with Affiliate Networks

Sending your affiliate network’s conversions to your Drip account is going to help you instantly generate more revenues out of your opt-in lists.

By sending more relevant content, you’ll increase your subscribers’ engagement, improve your delivery rate and eventually increase revenues.