11 Best Email Drip Campaign Software for 2024

Did you know that acquiring a new customer could cost up to 7X more than retaining an existing one? Okay, you probably read that somewhere. But are you also aware that increasing customer retention by 5% could potentially boost your profits by 25-95%? Yes, retention marketing is making a huge comeback. And this holds true for both existing customers who’ve already given you their money as well as prospects who have yet to.

One of the most effective ways to nurture, engage, and move both existing and potential customers is through email marketing — specifically, email drip campaigns. And it goes without saying that choosing a robust automated email drip campaign software goes a long way toward ensuring the success and ROI of your retention campaigns. Let’s look at the best ones in this article!

What is an Email Drip Campaign?

An email drip campaign, also called a nurture campaign, is a type of email marketing strategy that involves sending a series of automated emails to a specific segment of your email list. 

This is usually triggered by a subscriber’s action or behavior, and what follows is an email sequence that aims to educate, entertain, and therefore nurture them through their buyer’s journey.

For example, if a user subscribed to get information on a webinar (a trigger), they could get the following drip campaign:

• Welcome email with a registration link;
• Reminder a few days before the event;
• Reminder on the day of the event;
• Post-webinar email with a link to a recording;
• Follow-up email with a survey request;
• Follow-up email with a demo invitation.

Why Do We Need Email Drip Campaign Software?

Using drip email campaign software to set up your drip sequences could provide the following benefits to your business:

1. Automated communication. Drip email campaign software automates the process of sending emails to your audience at predetermined intervals, ensuring timely and consistent communication without manual effort.
2. Lead nurturing. By delivering targeted content to leads based on their behavior and preferences, drip campaigns effectively nurture leads through the sales funnel, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
3. Lead scoring. Drip email software often includes lead scoring capabilities, allowing you to assign values to leads based on their interactions with your emails. This helps prioritize leads for sales follow-up and ensures efficient resource allocation.
4. Increased engagement. Drip campaigns enable you to deliver relevant and timely content to your audience, resulting in higher open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement with your brand.
5. Time optimization. With automated scheduling and delivery, drip campaigns save time for your marketing team by eliminating the need for manual outreach, allowing them to focus on other strategic initiatives.
6. Cost-efficiency. Drip email software streamlines your email marketing efforts, reducing the need for manual labor and potentially costly resources. This can lead to significant cost savings for your business over time.
7. Personalization. Drip campaigns allow for personalized messaging tailored to the specific interests and behaviors of your audience, fostering stronger connections and driving higher conversion rates. 

The 11 Best Email Drip Campaign Software

Choosing the right email drip campaign messaging software can involve a fair amount of struggle with understanding the different feature mixes, ease of use considerations, integration capabilities, scalability, pricing, and more!

Here are our best suggestions to help you get started.

1. Sender – Most Affordable Email Drip Campaign Tool

Best for:

• Small and medium-sized businesses;
• Ecommerce;
• Non-profits.

Efficiently segment your email lists based on criteria such as purchase history and behavior to send highly targeted emails that drive conversion. Personalize your emails with dynamic content, enhancing relevance and engagement at scale.

Use the user-friendly visual workflow builder to easily set up fully automated email drip campaigns. Choose from pre-existing templates or create custom flows tailored to your needs. Additionally, use an in-built SMS messaging service to send promotional and transactional text messages to opted-in prospects.

Finally, leverage insights from Sender’s reports and analytics to track, manage, and optimize your email and SMS drip campaigns for maximum effectiveness over time.

Sender’s Key Features

• Drag-and-drop email builder;
• Premade, customizable, mobile-friendly email templates;
• Broadcast email and SMS campaigns;
• Automated email and SMS drip sequence campaigns;
• Reputation for high-email deliverability to recipient inboxes;
• High-converting popups & forms;
• Ready integration with popular ecommerce and CRM platforms.

Sender Pros & Cons

Sender Plans & Pricing

2. Drip – Best Marketing Automation Software

Best for:

• Small to medium-sized businesses; 
• Information product creators;
• B2B companies.

Drip is a leading automated marketing software tailored specifically for ecommerce companies. With its intuitive interface and robust features, Drip empowers businesses to engage customers effectively by understanding their preferences and behaviors. Utilizing dynamic segmentation, Drip refines marketing strategies, enabling businesses to better connect with their audience.

One of Drip’s standout features is its automation capabilities, which streamline daily tasks and enable businesses to run multi-channel marketing campaigns effortlessly. With customizable workflow templates and a visual workflow builder, businesses can tailor their marketing efforts to match their brand image and meet their unique business needs.

Moreover, Drip leverages triggers based on customer actions to send relevant content, enhancing the effectiveness of drip campaigns. With over 150 integrations, including Shopify, Stripe, and BigCommerce, Drip seamlessly connects with essential tools, fueling ecommerce marketing efforts.

Drip’s Key Features

• Dynamic segmentation;
• Multi-channel marketing;
• Customizable workflow templates;
• Integration;
• Personalization;
• Analytics and reporting.

Drip’s Pros & Cons

Drip’s Pricing

3. HubSpot – Best CRM Software with Drip Campaign Feature

Best for:

• Small and medium businesses;
• Startups;
• Agencies.

Use HubSpot’s drag-and-drop editor to create responsive email designs that display beautifully across both desktop and mobile devices. Choose from a set of free, high-converting email templates from the marketplace and customize its look, layout, and branding elements to have your email ready in no time.

Boost your email opens, clicks, and revenue by personalizing the email subject line and body with in-built or custom field data. Serve up the most relevant subject lines, links, attachments, and CTAs based on a subscriber’s lifecycle stage, list membership, or contact record information.

Use A/B testing and analytics to optimize your ordinary email campaigns into winners while scheduling them to ensure optimal timing and delivery to all inboxes, regardless of recipient time zones.

HubSpot’s Key Features

• Drag-and-drop email builder;
• Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google paid ads management;
• Organic social media management;
• Content hosting and management, including videos;
• No-code website builder;
• SEO management;
• Forms & landing pages creation and optimization.

HubSpot Pros & Cons

HubSpot Plans & Pricing

4. Saleshandy – Best Drip Email Campaigns Service For Cold Emailing

Best for:

• Small and medium businesses;
• Freelancers and consultants;
• Entrepreneurs and startups.

Source and add prospects to your cold email drip funnel, incorporating deeply personalized outreach strategies using custom fields, merge tags, and templates. This approach ensures that each email and subject line resonates with recipients on a personal level, increasing engagement and response rates.

Automate your follow-up process by setting up nurturing with multi-stage sequences designed to engage prospects over time. This automation not only saves time but also improves efficiency, leading to faster replies and, ultimately, better conversion rates.

Saleshandy goes beyond basic email automation by implementing safe deliverability practices such as the progressive warm email feature and sending human-like emails. These tactics help ensure that your emails land in your prospects’ inboxes rather than their spam folders, improving overall deliverability and campaign effectiveness. 

Saleshandy’s Key Features

• Unlimited email sending accounts & warmup;
• Tracking multiple Gmail inboxes using a single account;
• Personalized follow-ups using custom fields and merge tags;
• Multi-stage (up to 10), automated follow-up sequences;
• Receive real-time push notifications when recipients open or click a link in your emails;
• High-quality deliverability practices to hit maximum inboxes;
• A-Z testing of cold email templates;

Saleshandy Pros & Cons

Saleshandy Plans & Pricing

5. ActiveCampaign – Best Drip Email Marketing Automation Software For SaaS

Best for:

• Small and medium businesses;
• Marketing agencies;
• Content creators and bloggers.

ActiveCampaign streamlines personalized customer experiences through automated, targeted messaging across various industries. With 800+ pre-built automation workflows, it leads in email automation, catering from accounting to healthcare. Its powerful email drip workflows automate tasks like webinar reminders and welcome series emails effortlessly.

From manual flash sale broadcasts to triggered drip sequences based on purchase behavior, ActiveCampaign offers versatile automation options. Choose from over 250 customizable templates for newsletters, event invitations, abandoned cart reminders, and more. ActiveCampaign’s CRM integrates data from email, social media, ads, and websites, enhancing prospects’ buying journeys with personalized touchpoints.

ActiveCampaign’s Key Features

• All-in-one platform with emails and SMS;
• Forms and popup builder;
• Landing page builder;
• 250+ beautiful, customizable email templates;
• 800+ click-and-run, premade automation workflows;
• 900+ native app integrations.

ActiveCampaign Pros & Cons

ActiveCampaign Plans & Pricing

6. Mailchimp – Best Automated Drip Marketing Software for B2B Campaigns

Best for:

• Small and medium businesses;
• Ecommerce stores;
• Service-based businesses.

Mailchimp stands out as an email marketing platform specializing in creating automated emails tailored to recipients’ behaviors and engagement levels. From abandoned cart sequences to welcome email drip campaigns, post-purchase upselling, cross-selling, and feedback emails, Mailchimp offers a comprehensive suite of automated email solutions.

With Mailchimp, you can efficiently send out relevant and personalized emails at optimal times, maximizing the return on investment for your email marketing endeavors. Whether you’re welcoming new signups, announcing a product launch, or promoting a flash sale, Mailchimp’s library of over 100 email templates simplifies the design process, ensuring that your emails captivate your audience.

Mailchimp provides detailed insights into key metrics such as opens, clicks, and overall sales generated from each marketing campaign, enabling you to track performance effectively. By monitoring these key performance indicators, you gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns and can make data-driven optimizations to drive better results.

Mailchimp’s Key Features

• Customer journey builder using automated workflows;
• Drag-and-drop ecommerce store & website builder;
• Deep visitor insights & behavior based targeting;
• Custom popups and forms to generate leads;
• Advanced segmentation & personalization using predictive analytics;
• Multivariate & A/B testing of email campaigns.

Mailchimp Pros & Cons

Mailchimp Plans & Pricing

Also read: Effective Drip Marketing: What is It and How is It Done?

7. Customer.io – Drip Software for Best Customer Engagement

Best for:

• Ecommerce businesses;
• SaaS companies;
• Content publishers.

Customer.io is an elite drip email marketing software, tailored for tech-savvy marketing teams seeking the pinnacle of customer engagement platforms. Renowned as one of the most expensive options in the drip email marketing tools realm, Customer.io equips marketers with a comprehensive suite of features to elevate their campaigns.

With Customer.io, marketers benefit from flexible data integrations, including RESTful API and third-party integrations, ensuring seamless connectivity with existing systems. The platform boasts a robust segmentation engine, enabling precise targeting to ensure campaigns reach the intended audience effectively. Marketers can leverage data attribution and experimentation tools to gain valuable insights into campaign performance, driving data-driven decision-making processes.

A rule-based visual workflow builder simplifies the creation of complex drip email marketing campaigns, allowing for dynamic personalization and the incorporation of branching logic. Beyond email, Customer.io supports push notifications, expanding the reach of engagement efforts across multiple channels.

Customer.io Key Features

• Branching logic and conditions for campaign flows;
• Advanced segmentation;
• Visual workflow builder;
• API-triggered flows and scheduled email delivery;
• Detailed analysis reports.

Customer.io Pros & Cons

Customer.io Pricing

8. SendX – Simple Drip Email Software

Best for:

• Small and medium businesses;
• Ecommerce businesses;
• Digital agencies.

SendX is a robust drip email marketing software, ideal for businesses looking to enhance customer engagement through effective email campaigns. This intuitive platform simplifies the email marketing process, offering a visual email builder that enables users to edit emails effortlessly by dragging and dropping blocks. Additionally, SendX provides pre-built email templates and supports bulk import of contacts, streamlining campaign creation and management.

SendX allows users to tag and segment contacts based on various criteria, facilitating precise targeting and personalized communication with different audience segments. Users can conduct A/B tests on their campaigns to ensure they deliver the right message to the target audience, optimizing campaign performance and improving engagement rates. With heat maps, users can gain insights into which parts of the emails received the most clicks, helping them understand subscriber behavior and optimize future campaigns for better results.

SendX’s Key Features

• Contact tagging and segmentation
• A/B testing
• Heat maps
• Visual charts and graphs of engagement levels
• Automation capabilities

SendX’s Pros & Cons

SendX’s Pricing

9. Brevo – Best Drip Email Software for Small Business

Best for:

• Freelancers;
• Entrepreneurs;
• Startups.

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, emerges as a robust drip email software tailored specifically for small businesses. Offering an array of automation features, solid audience segmentation capabilities, and basic analytics, Brevo’s free plan stands out with no contact limits, making it an attractive option for businesses exploring email marketing on a budget. 

Brevo simplifies the setup of automated email sequence, enabling businesses to engage customers with timely and personalized emails, from abandoned cart reminders to welcome emails. The platform’s advanced segmentation capabilities allow businesses to automatically segment contacts based on behavior, interests, and other attributes across multiple channels, facilitating targeted and relevant communication.

Brevo’s workflow editor empowers users to create cross-channel campaigns effortlessly. Users can set triggers based on customer actions to gauge interest and drive engagement. Additionally, businesses can leverage automated re-engagement campaigns to reconnect with inactive customers, maximizing the effectiveness of their email marketing efforts.

Brevo’s Key Features

• Multichannel drips (SMS, WhatsApp, push);
• A/B testing for automated workflows;
• Automated lead scoring and list segmentation; 
• Dynamic personalization;
• Multichannel automation workflows;
• Detailed performance reports.

Brevo’s Pros & Cons

Brevo’s Pricing

10. ConvertKit – Highly Customizable Automated Funnels

Best for:

• Bloggers and content creators;
• Online course instructors;
• Small businesses and startups.

ConvertKit stands out as a comprehensive drip software solution, offering highly customizable automated funnels tailored to meet the needs of content creators aiming to convert their audience into loyal fans. With a focus on empowering creativity monetization on the web, ConvertKit provides a suite of tools designed to facilitate effective drip campaigns and nurture subscriber engagement.

ConvertKit offers two primary methods for setting up automation: sequences and automations. Sequences enable users to line up emails based on time delays and list filters, making it ideal for delivering online courses or nurturing subscribers. However, the real versatility lies in automations, boasting 28 templates that elevate email sequences to new heights.

Through automations, ConvertKit enables users to go beyond basic email delivery, allowing for the integration of landing pages, actions based on subscriber purchases, and seamless transitions between different automation sequences.

ConvertKit’s Key Features

• Autoresponders;
• A/B testing;
• Landing page builder;
• Visual automations;
• Email designer;
• Paid recommendations.

ConverKit’s Pros & Cons

ConvertKit’s Pricing

11. Constant Contact – Best Drip Campaign Email Messaging System for Realtors

Best for:

• Small businesses;
• Ecommerce businesses;
• Nonprofits.

Maximize visitor conversion into customers with Constant Contact’s highly effective contact handling features. Utilize tags, activity tracking, profile information, and more to seamlessly add, remove, or segment contact lists. Creating highly targeted and organized segments can significantly enhance conversion rates and ROI compared to mass emailing strategies.

Leverage automation to create personalized email flows triggered by specific actions, such as a new contact joining a mailing list or completing a contact form. This allows for timely and relevant communication that nurtures leads effectively throughout the customer journey.

Use Constant Contact’s capabilities to build targeted landing pages with optimized forms. Collect essential visitor data, including names, email addresses, and personal information, to grow your list of high-quality leads. By capturing key visitor information, you can tailor your marketing efforts and drive greater success in converting leads into loyal customers.

Constant Contact’s Key Features

• Drag-and-drop email editor with 100s of premade templates;
• Lead generation & list building tools;
• Email automation workflows;
• Email tracking & detailed reporting;
• Simple A/B testing of email subject lines.

Constant Contact Pros & Cons

Constant Contact Plans & Pricing

Overview of the Best Drip Campaign Software

Let’s compare what all the drip campaigns have to offer in one place:

Conclusion and Takeaways

Choosing the right email drip campaign software can be overwhelming, given the huge number of options to choose from.

Also, there can be no single best email drip software, only one that’s right for your business. We discussed and zeroed in on the following possible alternatives:

Ultimately, the best drip email software for your business is the one that alights 100% with your business’s core requirements, understands its gaps, and improves customer relationships, giving you higher ROI for your marketing efforts.

Also read: 

• 7 Best WordPress Newsletter Plugin for Your Site (Free & Paid)
• 11 Best Email Newsletter Software (Incl. Free Services)
• The 20 Best Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms in 2024

Author Bio

Vesta Oldenburg is a content writer specializing in email marketing strategies. In her daily work, creativity intertwines with a strategic mindset to create content that captivates its readers.