Bringing marketing automation to the masses – that’s one of the stated aims of Drip and with their impeccable pedigree as an off-shoot of LeadPages, I believe they are equipped to make that happen. If email marketing is part of your digital marketing strategy then this is a product that you should spend a little time in getting to know.

Everyone who has ever tried to create a landing page from scratch will have heard of LeadPages, they are almost certainly the market leader when it comes to those but what of other things they might turn their hand to? Well, now’s your chance to find out because Drip is a full-featured email and marketing automation platform from LeadPages and it certainly seems to cover most, if not all, of the bases for a small to medium sized organisation wishing to move their email marketing up a notch.

Leadpages acquired Drip earlier this year and intends to use it to provide a more complete and sophisticated marketing automation platform for users of Leadpages.

Leadpages founder and CEO, Clay Collins said, “The addition of Drip brings sophisticated marketing automation and a visual campaign builder to the Leadpages catalog,””This acquisition will help our customers convert more leads into customers.”

So what’s in the box? Here’s a snapshot of how Drip could snuggle up nicely with the rest of the activities in your digital marketing strategy:

This is the kind of joined-up automation and integration that you would expect from a much more sophisticated package like Infusionsoft or Marketo but here it is, albeit in an entry-level format, as part of a package that is available for a lot less money.

It’s early days and, so far, Drip hasn’t featured much on the main Leadpages site but I expect that to change soon as this is clearly a major strategic move by Collins and his team.

As to pricing, there’s a free Drip account for up to 100 contacts. This should let you try it out and get a feel for it. After that it’s a starting point of $49/month, which gets you most of the features and up to 2500 contacts with unlimited email sends. As yet Drip doesn’t appear in the Leadpages price tables and there’s no hint of a way as to purchase them both as a composite package, not yet anyway.

Drip has a good reputation in the marketplace, so too does Leadpages and I have been using Leadpages for several years now – their WordPress integration is top notch. If I were starting out looking for a marketing automation package I would definitely consider the LeadPages/Drip combo but I would feel more comfortable if the vendors were themselves presenting it as a joined-up package and not as two different systems stitched loosely together. A composite pricing structure would also help.