Drift Expert Reviews, Pricing, Alternatives - SSR 2023

Known as a revenue acceleration platform, Drift offers a range of AI-powered insights and solutions to drive marketing, sales, and customer support conversations and convert website visitors into qualified leads. Some of their solutions include custom chatbots, intel on website visitors in real-time, advanced analytics, and sales prospecting tools.

Drift is primarily an AI-powered live chat and chatbot solution that helps marketing, sales, and customer support teams to deliver personalized conversations and engage with website visitors.

Users who engage with your Drift chatbot and need to talk to a sales representative or customer support executive will be redirected to the live chat option. You can build playbooks, i.e., conversational flows, to ensure this happens. At any point in the conversation, you can switch to a phone or a Zoom call to quickly qualify a prospect on the spot. You can even use Drift Meetings which provides leads an option to book a meeting on your website for a date and time of their preference. 

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If you have a list of qualified leads who visit your website, you can send them a personalized message and let them schedule a meeting instantly. They can also be routed to a "Fast Lane," and a sales representative can immediately jump in to chat with them. At the end of a conversation, you can get feedback from your buyers using the Conversational Rating feature. You can also use the "Live View" option to see who is on your site in real-time and the "Conversational Analysis" feature to gather insights about how your flows are performing and optimize them to boost your conversion rates. 

Apart from this, Drift has a video option that lets you easily record and send videos to prospects. A noteworthy feature they offer is the ability to see if people are engaging with your video, who's watched it, and for how long. Based on that data, you can go back in and engage with the prospect to seal the deal. 

Drift's custom chatbot solution allows you to use a visual flow builder and build your own chatbot. You can create a list of questions, determine responses, and A/B test different flows to see which ones perform the best. However, the only channel you can build a chatbot on is your website. Drift does not allow you to set up a chatbot on platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, Telegram, and more.

Drift has a pretty neat analytics dashboard that provides data on which conversations are performing the best, which pages generate the most leads, and what's influencing your revenue and leads pipeline the most. It also provides a list of topics and keywords your customers ask about so you can create optimized and effective conversational flows that boost engagement and increase the performance of your marketing, sales, and customer support teams over time.

Drift's Prospector Tool automatically creates a list of contacts that are most engaging with your sales and marketing campaigns, so your sales teams know which prospects to reach out to and which leads are at what stage in the marketing funnel. They also have an Intel solution that provides information about website visitors in real-time such as company name, industry, revenue, location, and more, using their email and IP address. 

Overall, Drift is a good tool for mid to large-sized organizations looking to optimize their marketing and sales processes and drive leads through their website.

In the past, Drift’s subscription fee was around $400. While they no longer disclose their pricing upfront, users believe that it is still a very expensive chatbot solution. So if you’re on a shoestring budget, then Drift might not be the right option for your business.

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• Live chat software: This is the heart of Drift's revenue acceleration platform. Instead of having your customers fill out lengthy forms, you can offer a live conversation to increase engagement and provide a better customer experience.
• Fastlane: Once a website visitor is qualified as a lead, you can instantly route them to the sales team, and they can start a conversation with one of your sales reps without leaving your website. 
• Virtual selling assistants: Drift offers 24/7 virtual bots that complement your human sales and marketing team, answering questions and moving leads deeper into the sales funnel. 
• Drift Prospector: This feature lets businesses identify buying committees and prioritize accounts based on engagement scores.
• Drift Audiences: This tool collects data on where your page visitors are coming from to help you personalize conversations. It also lets you connect high-value accounts to dedicated sales reps with personalized messages when they visit your site.

Other tools available in the Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform are:

• Lead routing
• A/B testing 
• Data encryption
• Support for multiple languages

Drift supports 50+ integrations, including Marketo, Eloqua, Outreach, Salesforce, Clearbit, HubSpot, Demandbase, ON24, Bizible, Zendesk, Google Analytics, and Optimizely. Further integrations are possible with Zapier and Drift APIs.

If you're an early-stage startup with less than 50 employees, then you can try Drift's free plan. They also offer three paid plans as follows: 

1. Premium: Designed for small businesses looking to scale at speed, this plan offers features like custom chatbots, insights to deliver personalized experiences to website visitors, and integration with Salesforce. 
2. Advanced: Ideal for mid-sized businesses that want to engage with their audience and generate qualified leads, this plan includes all the features in Premium, plus A/B testing, audience analytics, and advanced lead routing.
3. Enterprise: If you're a large organization that wants to improve customer support and personalize at scale, this is the plan for you. It includes everything in Advanced, plus features like multiple languages, AI-powered chatbots, and custom role-based access controls (RBAC).

Since prices can vary based on the number of employees, the best way to know the actual cost of the subscription plan is to get a demo and talk to their team.

Drift is ideal for medium to large-sized organizations that are on the lookout for an all-in-one chatbot solution that not only provides customer support but also helps generate leads and boosts revenue.

Creating a chatbot with Drift is fairly simple and can be done in three easy steps:

• Copy and paste Drift's Javascript code block into your website's header
• Connect your calendar, add your team, and set up routing rules
• Plug your questions into the lead bot visual builder and turn it on

All paid plans include access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager, frequent revenue acceleration strategy reviews, onboarding assistance, and chat support. Apart from this, they offer email assistance, video user guides, developer documentation for information on API and building your own integrations, video training, and step-by-step onboarding guides. They also have a community of over 45,000 members with whom you can have conversations about marketing, sales, and Drift.

Drift, established in 2015, brings conversational marketing, sales, and customer support into a single platform, so businesses can build a quality pipeline of leads, boost revenue, and improve customer satisfaction.