Update: The post is not relevant anymore, as Drip has released a point and click visual email builder which helps design templates easily.
Drip is a very popular choice for email marketing automation. As the people at Leadpages quote :
“Drip outsmarts traditional email marketing to help you sell more online. Thousands of marketers are graduating from typical email platforms to drip.”
This is true for the most part, but there are definitely some shortcomings. Without a doubt, Templates is one of them. And since drip wants more and more marketers to move from typical email marketing platforms (ahem! Mail chimp ahem! Has good templates ahem!) they should seriously consider improving drip email templates.
If you are just going to be sending plain text emails then templates are not exactly necessary for you and drip would just be the perfect tool given its intelligent marketing automation capabilities, but that’s not always the case. An email marketing platform is used to send all sorts of marketing emails. Marketers send newsletters and marketing emails. These emails consist of images, CTA and a copy that is intended to grab the reader’s attention. In such cases, templates will definitely come in handy.
Don’t get me wrong Drip does have templates, well compared to its contenders it’s just not that user-friendly and in drip using multiple templates within a campaign is close to not possible.
Drip prefers that for creating custom emails you do it by writing it in HTML. If you have all the time in the world and you’re comfortable crafting emails and templates in HTML, you will not need predefined templates or an easy template builder. This method is time-consuming and not very convenient given that you have to style all your emails now, and to make changes in the future you have to go through this process all over again.
Copywriters/marketers are not front-end developers so templates are a pretty big deal. Till Drip makes customisation as good as their automation we as marketers need a workaround.
Beepro is an easy and effective way to create and manage HTML emails. They have an easy Drag and drop email builder with a variety of predefined templates to choose from. Just add your copy and images everything else is basically taken care. Beepro lets you export HTML email with or without uploaded images.
Now that you have all your custom email created in HTML using a third party tool you would just copy and paste this in the source tab in your editor and you are ready to go.
Well! It’s not that easy either.
What you have now is a full email draft in HTML and just adding this to the source section in Drip will not work.
This is because every email in Drip is already skinned with a template. This default template called a “simple template” is made to structure the plain text emails and separate the header and footer of every drip email. You need to make changes to this simple template to get any HTML based email to work irrespective of which tool you used to create the email/template.
The Simple template that drip uses not only has styling elements but has a full structure to it. Even if the styling of the simple template kinda looks pretty basic it will mess with your custom Emails. Not a simple template after all. Safest and the best option is to just remove the styling from the existing template. Remove everything from all the style tags and you are ready to go.
What do you think about Templates in Drip? Do you think templates are such a big deal? Let us know in the comments below.
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