Leadpages buys SMB marketing automation platform Drip

Landing page templates, from Leadpages’ website

Leadpages is expanding its portfolio beyond tools for creating landing pages and optimizing them for conversion, with its announcement today that it has purchased marketing automation platform Drip.

Deal terms for Leadpages’ first acquisition were not made public. A year ago, Leadpages scored a $27 million Series B round of financing, and co-founder Clay Collins told me that his company, founded in early 2013, remains “acquisitive.”

Drip provides what it describes as “lightweight marketing automation” for small and medium-sized businesses, centered around email. This includes a visual workflow builder, forms for capturing email addresses, tags for tracking subscribers’ actions on a website or in an email, email marketing and a lead scoring algorithm. It also integrates with dozens of other applications and platforms, including Zapier, Shopify and PayPal.

Leadpages claims about 43,000 paying customers. Previously, Collins said, it had been sending potential customers from its landing pages to various customer relationship management platforms, email service providers and marketing platforms. Here’s a screen showing the landing page builder:

“We wanted to provide value at the next link in the chain,” he said, adding that Drip’s visual campaign builder is a particular attraction for small companies that don’t want the expense or lack of expandability found in, say, Marketo. Here’s a screen with the visual builder:

But the “next link in the chain” won’t be a merged experience between the two platforms, at least not at first. The companies and their user interfaces will remain separate, although there will be a single sign-on for both, a back-end integration more extensive than what is currently available between the two and the ability to switch back and forth.

Collins emphasized that Leadpages “supports an open marketing stack,” and both platforms will continue to integrate with the others’ competitors.

Eventually, he said, both will inform their personalization based on data from each other, such as personalized landing pages from Leadpages that are built according to responses in a Drip email. But, he added, Leadpages might also offer such data-driven customization with other marketing platforms.

Drip will retain its office in Fresno, California, while its CEO and co-founder, Rob Walling — now VP of product at Leadpages — and several members of his team will be moving to Leadpages’ headquarters in Minneapolis.