Drift is a cloud-based live chat, in-app messaging, and email management platform that consolidates critical features for sales and marketing teams. The platform offers customizable live chat widgets, email follow-ups for abandoned chats, conversation histories, email campaign automation, and an AI-powered chatbot. Among its key features include Drift’s in-app messaging that targets its customers with full-page takeovers and slider messages. Users can also create automated email campaigns with a range of triggers, for customer onboarding, churn prevention, and more.
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
It's easy and human way of connecting with future customers
The monthly updates may be too much for the frequency to keep up.
Talk directly to future customers without any forms and hassle. If that person is ready to chat, there is no reason to delay them.
With Drift you can easily qualify Leads at a stage you are not even aware that they exist. Having Playbooks in place for all your different Landing-/Subpages guarantees that at each point of your funnel, the chat functionality can add extra value to your prospects. The conversations are 100% customizable, so you can always be sure that the right questions are asked at the right point in time. Furthermore, it gets easy for our Sales team to schedule calls with pre-qualified Leads. As we are based in Germany, but work together with a lot of companies in the US, Drift's calendar integration gets straight to the pain point: time tone difference and multiple emails back and forth until you find a suitable slot are gone. People can so easily pick a slot from your sales reps calendar and get the bridge for the call instantly - it is fascinating.
Drift can become confusing sometimes through the sheer endless possibilities that one gets. New features, options, and undiscovered functionalities. Yet, and that's the good part about this, their customer success reps do one hell of a job keeping you up-to-date!
Drift basically enables us to funnel prospects on our website and qualify them in a matter of seconds. If they can not be qualified by the bot itself, one of the Sales reps can easily jump into the conversation and qualify the leads manually. Herewith, sales conversations get a lot more frictionless and it is easier for our sales team to find out what exactly the lead is looking for. Furthermore, a lot of Leads that potentially wouldn't even bother writing you an email sometimes give the bot a shot - or you can directly ping them. This enables us to actually increase the size of our Sales funnel as well.
Not only does Drift simplify your overall sales and marketing pipeline, but it seamlessly fits in with the rest of your brand, in some cases probably improves it. As a consultant recommending Drift to my clients, and as a full-time employee recommending Drift to my employer. I've seen multiple sides of the consumer's point of view. But the need is usually the same. The way businesses/consumers buy from one another is changing, and as far as I can see Drift is at the forefront of that.
As a consumer? Companies that don't use Drift...
As a freelance consultant, I RAVED about Drift to my clients, the ones who were able to implement it right away so IMMEDIATE results... I can't stress that enough. We literally had customers walking through the door who wouldn't have had they not communicated with us first via drift. One client even sought out a second location in order to deal with the influx of customers.
Being able to make sure the sales team only interacts with the best fit prospects makes sure we have more engagement with the leads that will become big deals, and at the same time being able to automate interaction with the lower value leads.
Needs to be more complete - they have branched out from just conversations to now email and added some reporting too... I'm looking forward to having even more capabilities.
Drift helps us engage with more Fortune 2000 companies (which is our target market) which is extremely valuable because of how big those deals are. We have booked multiple demos with Fortune 500 companies using Drift. It also allows us to have an automated but personalized interaction with lower value leads.
Drift has enabled our business to filter out the huge volumes of traffic coming to our website so we can focus on prospects that are truly interested in Swipii. Using Drift we can ask those all important pre-qualifying questions that determine very quickly if a business is a good fit for our product - and once we identify these hotter prospects we can jump in and start having real conversations.
My only dislike is in essence a positive - Drift are adding so many new features and refinements, and at such a pace, that there is the risk that we fall behind in using it to its full capacity. I think it would be beneficial to spend more time getting to know some of the newer features better before being overwhelmed with new updates and UX/UI changes.
Drift has allowed us to engage more effectively with our website traffic instead of losing leads for good. The speed at which we convert traffic to leads has improved greatly and once these leads are passed to sales they are much warmer than many of our other lead sources. A huge benefit is also the fact that Drift works seamlessly even when no one is in the office...so we are coming into new leads every morning which is always a positive for sales and marketing.
The platform is growing at an impressive rate, so are the available features and releases that occur on a monthly basis. We are an agency partner and love exploring the capabilities of the platform with our own clients, getting our prospects excited about engaging their website visitors to start a conversation. I have worked with industry competitive marketing automation platforms which require 10x the effort, for the same result.
There is an intermittent issue at times where playbooks and drift buttons take a bit longer to load, which creates an awkward situation where the user is forced to reload a page or wait for the bot to respond to an action. This has improved over time but can be added risk.
Creating minimal and engaging conversation opportunities throughout a website experience. Users are often faced with many questions when prospecting to solve a problem or look for a service that you offer, having an open door for the user to engage and communicate with you, and your team is crucial in the world where we all depend on some sort of instant messaging platform (Facebook Messenger, What's App, etc) We realize the benefits of "being there" and ready to answer someones question far outweighs the hundreds of blog posts and articles you expect your users have time to comb through.
I love the best about drift is the ability to create playbooks and let a leadbot run them to help guide, engage and qualify visitors into prospects on our website and the websites of our clients.
The only thing I'd say I dislike is that "conversational marketing" and using bots for marketing in general is so new that many people don't quite get it and it takes time to get them up to speed. But that is why the opportunity is so great!
We are helping our clients realize better ROI from all lead generation efforts by dramatically increasing conversion rates on their landing pages and website. We are replacing static web forms wherever possible with conversational marketing.
Drift's success team is unparalleled. From onboarding to access to beta products they think you'd benefit from, the team is always working with me to find ways to be more successful as a marketer and Drift user.
The lack of product roadmap transparency,
The biggest problem we were trying to solve with Drift, was an informal way to personalize and contextualize the information gathering process on our website. Long gone are the days of forms and "give to gets" and Drift gives us a frictionless experience where someone can come to the site and get any question they want answered without the feeling of being sold to. It's truly a conversational platform, and the future of sales and marketing. Even better? Their customer success team doesn't stop until you're education and enabled to use Drift in a way that's most impactful for your business. Along the way, we've benefitted from their team and knowledge-base, as well as the ease of helping our prospects become happy customers.
I love the way Drift enables our organization to interact with web visitors, even when we're not present. More than a chat solution, Drift is a conversation generator. The ability to seamlessly integrate bots, live chat, and scheduling solutions makes it easy to take a quick question all the way through to a sales meeting.
I'm looking forward to the development of additional integrations with other software platforms we use. Existing integrations are great, but they need more.
We're having conversations with a much larger percentage of our web traffic. The primary benefit has been more leads in less time. The efficiency gain for our prospects has made engaging with us easier. We've cleared the path with Drift for both our prospects and our business development reps.
We were among the first to use Drift. It didn't replace an existing chat client for us. And there is good reason for it. Drift was free. Plus we didn't need any onboarding to use the chat program or the playbooks. It is probably the easiest software we've ever relied on so much that has been so easy to use in the beginning. We've now grown with the product and are using more features. We make lots of websites that help companies and primarily their sales teams connect with prospects viewing the site. A website doesn't answer every question for a prospect and you have so many people on your site ready to buy, but they still might not want to talk to someone in sales. Drift solves this for us and our clients for these reasons not ranked in any order: 1. Anyone can use it. It's easy. 2. It has an app and a slack integration so you can have conversations as easily as you can texting someone. 3. The screen takeover is awesome for the end user. It is extremely user friendly on mobile. This means it's just as easy for your visitors to chat. As easy as it would be for text messaging. 4. You can set messages and "playbooks" to behave in a unique way for targeted pages. This allows your messaging to be contextual. This is helpful to your visitors and the members of your team. Contextual conversations are critical. Everyone comes into the conversation informed. 5. The same context can be set using personalization. You can setup rules for specific contacts. This is amazing. You don't want to greet a long time customer the same way you would a new visitor. 6. Drift respects the visitors privacy. Conversations are not gated by an email. This allows the visitor to choose their own level of engagement. No one trusts that giving an email is used to help them. Everyone expects that giving their contact information invites a pushy sales conversation. This is huge b/c the entire product is built around this philosophy. By removing the gate, so many more people are willing to have conversations. 7. You are able to take your conversation offline and outside of the chat window. By having such a visitor friendly and user friendly interface it leads to a lot of dialogue and the visitor will ask to take the conversation to a meeting, a call or an email. 8. You can match contacts to team members. If a member of your team is already connected to a contact, the contact will see that member of your team and not a new face greeting them on the site. 9. You can match pages to team members. This allows you to match expert members of your team on the subject matter related to the page. 10. Playbooks and bots. I was reluctant to use the bots. However with playbooks, bots are super helpful in guiding visitors through things like FAQ's or answering standard questions. It is also super helpful setting up a meeting or booking a time. It is so much more helpful combining the bot as a helper to the person on the team. 11. The most important thing! Funnel Compression: Traditionally funnels have been setup to create engagement. Content is gated through a form. Then an email is sent out (sometimes to another form). Then the prospect is put into a nurture sequence or drip campaign. The goal is to continue to work the prospect through the funnel until they are ready to buy. But this in reality is often unnecessary and misused. With Drift you can take a top of the funnel browsing visitor and let them engage on their terms. Often what seems to be an FAQ discussion leads to a sale very quickly eliminating all of the other stuff that gets in the way. There are many more advanced features and new features that I didn't cover. My best suggestion is to take a look at the Drift website to see them all. When you get there use the program as an end user. And then with a few clicks try the free version of Drift. In full transparency, I run a partner company to Drift. However the partner program is brand new and to date I have not done any paid work with that program. We were among the first users of Drift and this review is based on our own business experience with it. We've recommended it 100 times not even knowing that they'd even have a partner program.
Drift has become so relied upon for our visitors and our team, I would love it if the product team made an even better way to notify our team. Like the bell that rings on a shop door. We can never be annoyed enough by the sound of a new visitor.
Drift reduces friction from being easy to use for the visitor and the user on your team. We're currently at 799 conversations. I'm sure by the end of the day we will be at over 800. Many of those conversations have created sales we would never have had otherwise. And it has also made things so much better and faster for our buyers and our team.
Drift's real-time view of chat in's allows us to see who is visiting our website as they are there.
Sometimes the automation doesn't work and it comes across as if the robot we have setup doesn't want to assist them. Better filter logic would help this out a lot.
We have been able to get in touch with a much higher volume of potential customers who visit our website, and connect with them right as they are on our site like never before!
The best part is that after setting up the bot, our lead conversion has skyrocketed. With constant development of the bot, we are able to serve our leads and customers with a more personalized grip and more importantly when the visitor wants to be helped. Giving space and time for the lead to work out the problem through conversation in their time schedule has been found profitable. For someone who works in sales, I have been able to help people in right time after the time spent on qualification and data input have decreased.
So for, I have no complaints. I get help from the support when needed and it works as wanted (all minor bugs have been fixed quickly).
As mentioned, the best part is the lead qualification. Sparing my own time and sparing leads time. Cutting down the timeline between the initial touch and the problem solved / guided towards right direction.
Connecting with our website visitors in a proactive way. Allowing our after hours customers to schedule a call with our sales team if they meet certain qualification questions. Their support and success team is second to none.
Would be nice if we could use it for our support chat to inside our software/app.
Pulling more leads from our website be it during hours or after hours. Our Drift bot can handle the basic questions and get the chat routed in the best direction so our leads go to sales and customers go to service.
With a community of over 300,000 RapidMiner users, there's no way that a legacy live chat box was going to work for us. We use Drift bots to engage our users, answer common questions, and offer human help when needed. Behind the scenes, the bots ask some qualifying sales questions so that we know where to invest our limited resources. The end result is that we're able to help our users 24/7 while uncovering users who are ready to have a sales conversation with us. I also love that Drift is a great development platform. I've created a few simple Drift applications, for example one of our bots allows the user to search the RapidMiner knowledge base right inside the conversation window. Drift releases new products every month, and I can't wait to see what they deliver next (and next, and next, and...)
I wish Drift had better support for the Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes they release new products that only work with Google at first.
Drift influences over 33% of the new sales pipeline we create each month, and it has been the source of some of the largest deals that we've closed at RapidMiner in the past 12 months. I can attribute well over seven figures of ARR to conversations that started on Drift.
Drift is a highly effective online conversion tool. It was easy to implement and learn how to use for our team members. The recorded live chat transcripts help us learn what works and improve continually. New features such as calendar and email integration are giving us new opportunities to deepen our customer relations.
Keeping up with the new features - definite FOMO effect if I don't put the extra yards in to learn how to incorporate these in our marketing.
Qualifying and converting online leads to customers - running above 50% versus 2% for general website traffic Making our customer experience much better by a) live help/website directions and b) learning their pain points and changing our website Training our team using the communication techniques with proven results as shown by Drift data
Not only is the user interface fluid and easy to use but the setup to test out how it works on your site is seemless. On top of that the integration with notifications and customization within Wordpress made this one of the easiest tools I've ever setup and configure for my site.
I wish more sites would focus on features around one objective like drift does so the only thing I dislikes is that other tools aren't copying the model and setup that Drift does for customization and configuration
I'm a speaker and podcast host and preach the power of community and conversations yet on my website filling out a form is such a form task that most people would leave my site to go to social media to engage me. This tool has not only increased the number of conversations happening on my site but changed the engagement from formal to personalized which allows me to really engage and provide value.
I am having more conversations and setting more sales appointments than ever before. The mobile app helps me stay connected to the conversations folks are starting on our website. This platform connects to almost everything very well (like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, etc...) but it seems like they are eating those platforms lunch on usability. It's just a beautiful product to use.
With the rapid pace of development, it's hard to complain about anything; because most usability issues I have ever spotted have been immediately fixed (I'm talking about "day of") I'd like to be able to dig into the contact database a little more with the mobile app to send emails and build dynamic segments.
As a busy professional, I don't have a lot of time to work on my pipeline. I rely heavily on folks engaging with content on our website and reaching out with questions. Over the last 30 days, 12 out of the last 17 initial sales calls have booked time with me through the calendar scheduling system within Drift.
The ability to take livechat & bot chat experience and connect it to normal navigation (ie: page menus etc) is amazing. Any time that I need help drift has the answer and even provides additional recommendations too. We moved over to Drift because we wanted to increase the conversion rates from the forms being submitted. Chatbot playbooks have been a natural way for us to do this.
Would love to see more emphasis on the HubSpot integration. The field mapping and integration could be stronger IMHO - Would love to see revenue tracking here (just like in salesforce).
We have been using Drift and have seen some incredible increases in conversion rates. The amount of people who are engaging in conversations is pretty compelling and it's working great to allow us to answer more questions that prospects have that we wouldn't have known if waiting on a form submission. We've implemented the scheduling tools for all staff members and now clients can make meetings with our staff without the back and forth. The sales cycle has even shortened drastically, we've gone from a 4-5 call close to a few projects going through with a live chat and a 1 call close. That's definitely affecting the ROI. Great Solution!
Drift allows users to initiate quick conversations and get immediate answers to product questions without the friction of lead forms. Great addition to our top-of-the-funnel process!
So far so good. The integration to our website was a snap
Drift shortens the sales cycle with immediate customer discussions which help lead assignment challenges
The idea of collecting information without the use of a form
Playbooks can be tricky and take some time to set up properly
Increase of conversions on our website