Pipedrive Marketing: Automation, Tools, Integrations – A Complete Overview

Mar 7, 2020

Last updated: April 17th, 2023

So you have a Pipedrive account to manage your sales processes, and you’re looking to improve and automate marketing. You’ve come to the right place! We’ve put together this handy guide about Pipedrive marketing: automation, tools, integrations, and more.

Can Pipedrive be used for marketing?

Pipedrive started out as a sales CRM and its core functionality is still built up around its pipeline functionality. However, in recent years, Pipedrive has made a number of acquisitions which indicates that Pipedrive’s leadership realizes the importance of closing the gap between sales and marketing.

As an example, since acquiring the marketing automation tool Mailigen, Pipedrive has started the process of integrating the tool into Pipedrive, calling it Campaigns by Pipedrive.

We’re big fans of connecting sales and marketing, regardless of whether you decide to use an all-in-one suite, pick and mix “best-of-breed” tools (or both!). In this article, we look at some of the best tools for marketing that is in sync with Pipedrive. The main focus will be on best-in-class 3rd party marketing automation tools that integrate seamlessly with Pipedrive.

We’ve done the hard work of reviewing many possible options, so it’s easier for you to decide on your stack.

Before we jump in, let’s take a step back and ask: what exactly is this “marketing automation” that we’re looking for?

There are three core marketing functions that most companies look to automate:

  • Email marketing – sending out marketing newsletters, drip campaigns and other event-triggered emails.
  • On-site marketing / lead generation – forms, chat, web visitor tracking, and the like.
  • Marketing reporting – tying it all together and seeing what generated sales/revenue, without having to manually recreate charts and graphs every time.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but they’re the main things most businesses are looking to do well. Simply getting these fundamentals right goes a long, long way.

Jump to the section that strikes your fancy or scroll on:

Email marketing integrations for Pipedrive

Let’s start with email, which is still considered one of the most powerful and effective marketing channels for any business. It is still heavily used, and continues to be a primary driver of customer retention and sales for SMBs.

So what do you need to do to get the maximum value out of your email marketing setup, when there are so many great email tools to choose from, most of which have similar features?

Email marketing can be a broad topic, so here’s a shortlist of email features companies are usually looking to get out of marketing automation:

  • Email newsletters: sending out good old emails to the whole base or a certain segment
  • Drip emails: email sequences to establish the first contact with leads or nurture existing leads
  • Triggered emails: sending an email when a lead did or didn’t do a specific thing (a micro-conversion, as some call them)
  • Email tracking: seeing which leads clicks which email

As a Pipedrive user, you’ll want to make sure that the email marketing automation tool you use is well-integrated with Pipedrive.

What would that help you do, and what might that look like in practice?

  1. Save time. You’ll want your email segments to be auto-updated without having to manually do it yourself, over and over again.
  2. Get more context for sales. You’d also want your Pipedrive to be automatically updated with any useful information from your email marketing tool – what emails were opened? What links were clicked? This gives your sales team more context, so they know which leads to focus on.

These days, you can Zapier or other similar integration software to put together your own automated connections between apps. As Pipedrive users and marketers ourselves, we found the connections rather ‘shallow’.

Zapier works great for simple one-way ‘Zaps’ like “push contacts from this CRM list to that marketing audience”, but it can get complex, messy and expensive if you want 2-way sync or customized workflows.

So all in all, it still makes sense to pick email marketing tools that integrate deeply with Pipedrive.

What else do you need to do in order to have a good email marketing setup that helps you better achieve your sales and marketing goals?

What else do you need to do in order to have a good email marketing setup that helps you better achieve your sales and marketing goals?

To pick the best email tool(s) for the job, you’ll also want to be clear about the type of marketing & sales emails you’ll be sending

Before you start evaluating tools, it can be helpful to first think about the kinds of emails you want to send. Different tools have different “product DNA”, and you’ll want to pick the tool that best suits your needs.

Broadly, there are three types of ‘email formulas’ you may want to use. It’s possible to use a combination of these strategies, but it’s worth figuring out what your primary strategy is.

  • Regular one-off email campaigns – One-off emails, newsletters and email blasts to generate opportunities from your email list.
  • “Warm” email sequences or drip campaigns – These are email sequences designed for nurturing leads who already expect to hear from you. Campaigns of this type may also be designed for following up with leads e.g. post-purchase.  
  • “Cold” email sequences or drip campaigns – High-volume mass-sent email sequences to scraped/cold emails to generate interest, and ideally get a reply or schedule a demo.

Let’s walk through the kind of email marketing software that suit each of these lead generation strategies well.

A. Regular ‘one-off’ email campaigns – you’ll want an email tool that pushes open and click-through rates automatically to Pipedrive

Perhaps you’ve collected some leads over time via your site – or maybe from exhibitions and events, and you want to keep them engaged.

Or perhaps you are in an active sales relationship with parties who aren’t looking to buy right now, and they say “come back in 6 months” – so you want them to periodically share relevant information with them so they keep you in mind when they’re ready to buy.

In all of these cases, when you want to periodically send out a bulk email, we recommend using Pipedrive’s own Campaigns, Brevo, or Mailchimp.

1. Pipedrive Campaigns is a basic email automation tool integrated into Pipedrive

new product Campaigns by Pipedrive.

Why we like the Pipedrive Campaigns setup:
  • Automate sending email campaigns to segments you define with Pipedrive filters.
  • Record email engagement in Pipedrive as Notes.
  • The user interface is great for sending straightforward marketing newsletters
Where it may fall short:
  • Merge fields are limited — for example, there’s no first name merge field, but just a full name one.
  • Campaigns by Pipedrive lacks many popular email marketing features as evidenced by comments and requests on the Pipedrive Community.

2. Brevo is a full-blown marketing automation platform for SMBs, and can be tightly integrated with Pipedrive

Sendinblue

Brevo is a full-blown marketing automation suite with flexible pricing (which is great for SMBs)

The key features Sendinblue offers are:

  • Email marketing campaigns, transactional emails support
  • Live chat functionality
  • Signup forms, landing pages and A/B testing tools
  • It also offers SMS marketing, social media ads support and more

Sendinblue’s pricing is very SMB-friendly, with a free plan available. Paid options scale by functionality and the number of emails you send every month.

Outfunnel (yes, that’s us!) offers a Pipedrive-Sendinblue integration that syncs contacts and email engagements between the two platforms

Our Pipedrive-Sendinblue integration helps you seamlessly keep the two tools in sync, as if you had an all-in-one platform. Sync contacts you define with Pipedrive filters to Sendinblue 24/7. Whenever new leads are added into the CRM, relevant email lists are updated automatically. (Full disclosure: it’s not real-time, but the sync is frequent enough for B2B use cases.)

email engagement and web visits in pipedrive
Outfunnel’s integration pushes relevant information into Pipedrive.

What’s more, our users love that Outfunnel records email marketing engagement (e.g. email sends, opens, clicks) in Pipedrive. In this way, your salespeople have full context of leads and can sell smarter. But don’t just take our word for it, here’s what a recent review in Pipedrive’s App marketplace said about Outfunnel’s integration:

The app is very helpful. I tested it with sendinblue+pipedrive and it works perfect. Above all, the support team is great, and responds to all questions very quickly and is willing to help with any kind of issue.

Alexandre Nassiopoulos, founder and CEO at Ecotropy

3. Mailchimp is a popular and effective tool for sending email blasts, with a strong email template editor and solid Pipedrive integration

Pipedrive’s listing on Mailchimp’s integrations page
  • Mailchimp offers the Forever Free plan for up to 2,000 contacts and 12,000 emails per month (with ads).
  • The Growing Business plan starts at $10 per month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails.

Mailchimp is trusted by tens of millions of customers and sends over a billion emails a day. They have lots of great templates as well as an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, and you can also setup landing pages and email capture forms to build your email list.

They also have some useful features like segmentation, testing, and reports.

Mailchimp has a basic integration with Pipedrive – here’s how you can use it

If you type “Pipedrive Mailchimp integration” into Google, one of the first results is Pipedrive’s own native Mailchimp integration. You may think, “great, this is free and built by the companies I already trust!”.

However, the native integration is very basic. It only works for exporting your Pipedrive contacts to Mailchimp, one-way.

Outfunnel’s Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration keeps your contacts in sync and automatically records Mailchimp engagement data in Pipedrive

While Pipedrive’s native Mailchimp CRM integration allows you to export contacts from Pipedrive to Mailchimp, it doesn’t simultaneously push any information from Mailchimp back to Pipedrive.

As a result, you’ll have to update your sales team manually with the information from Mailchimp – and in practice, most of the time, this simply doesn’t happen at all!

Outfunnel helps you solve this. Our Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration helps you seamlessly “complete the loop” and updates your Pipedrive with relevant information in Notes (and/or Activities, and/or new Deals).

Outfunnel also lets you sync contacts (or segments you define with Pipedrive filters) 2-way between Pipedrive and Mailchimp. So if new leads are added into the CRM, relevant email lists are updated automatically.

pipedrive and mailchimp connection

B. Email sequences to “warm” leads – these are drip campaign tools that integrate well with Pipedrive, helping you nurture interested leads

What’s the difference between “cold” and “warm” email sequences? It boils down to the consent of the receiver. If you sign up to Outfunnel, for example, you will get our welcome email, which is designed to walk you through our product. You already know the context, and you opted-in, so we can be honest and straightforward with you.

The emails can be ‘marketing-focused’ – and they can be tailored to be responsive to actions you might have taken on the site, pages you may have visited and so on.

So, let’s review the strongest contenders for automated email sequences.

1. Outfunnel (that’s us!) – help your sales team get better information because email marketing is tightly integrated with Pipedrive

Outfunnel allows you to create automated drip and multi-stage lead nurturing campaigns that integrate seamlessly with your CRM. We call these types of email campaigns, sequences.

email sequences

Some examples of when our email sequences feature would be useful:

  • Following up after deals are won (or lost)
  • Reaching out once deals reach a certain stage of the sales funnel
  • Warming up fresh leads at the early stage of the pipeline

You can use these triggered email sequences to engage segments defined in Pipedrive. Email opens and clicks will be automatically recorded back in your CRM.

Outfunnel also offers website visitor tracking and lead scoring, and both of these are synced to Pipedrive as well. This way your sales team can know who the warmest leads are, and prioritize their efforts accordingly.

You can check out our Pipedrive Marketplace page here.

2. Ortto (previously Autopilot) integrates well with Pipedrive and is good with sequences – it has a nice “drag-and-drop” automation system, and an elegant visual interface

autopilot marketing automation
Autopilot’s page on the Pipedrive Marketplace
  • 30 day free trial
  • $99/month mid-tier, with multiple additional add-ons (eg $199/month Salesforce CRM integration)

One of Autopilot’s interesting features is that it allows you to have “round robin lead assignment”, automating the assignment of leads evenly across your sales team.

Another interesting feature is that it allows you to automatically send Slack messages to your team when leads are assigned.

If you check out Autopilot’s marketplace reviews, it’s nice to see that their CEO personally replies to customer feedback.

3. Drip is great for elaborate event-based email sequences, but it can be tedious to get data from Pipedrive into it

drip email marketing
Drip’s page on the Pipedrive Marketplace

Drip’s native integration with Pipedrive allows you to create new Deals from your Drip subscribers via a range of triggers. For example, you may want to create a new deal for people that have completed a particular email Campaign or that have opened or clicked specific emails.

Drip itself is great for elaborate event-based email sequences, so this tool could be very handy if you have a large list of leads and enough content+ tracking to be able to provide complex email journeys.

The downside is that it’s not trivial to get data from Pipedrive into Drip or marketing data from Drip to Pipedrive. You can use Zapier as a duct tape between the services or create a custom integration based on API’s of both products.

At the time of writing, Drip doesn’t have any reviews on its Pipedrive Marketplace page.

C. “Cold” email sequence tools –  these are sales-y Pipedrive-integrated prospecting tools that harvest emails in bulk from the wild

Let’s be honest. At Outfunnel, we believe that sending endless cold emails to uninterested people is a bad idea. There’s just too much spam in the world already, and contributing to it is not a good look. You’ll get higher quality leads and better responses if you put in the effort into persuading people to want to receive emails from you. And you build a better brand that way.

That said, if you still want to be doing this sort of cold outreach, there are tools that help you do this. We haven’t used these tools personally ourselves, so we can’t give you much more information than what’s available via Google.

1. Overloop integrates with Pipedrive, has a Gmail extension and Chrome plugin – $129/mo

  • Price: $129/month for 2,000 emails, 25% discount for annual pricing
  • 30-day no-questions-asked money back guarantee

Overlook positions itself as a CRM, but it packs a whole lot of functionality. Its sales prospecting feature is optimized to help you find and verify details about your prospects, such as emails, phone numbers, job titles, and more. It also lets you build templates and drip campaigns to automate your follow-ups.

Check out Overloop’s Pipedrive Marketplace reviews here.

P.S: We can also get behind Overloop’s advice regarding how to send better prospecting emails.

2. Klenty has similar features to Overloop, with a Gmail extension and Chrome plugin, and appears to be more “call-oriented” – $60/mo

pipedrive email marketing with klenty
  • Free for 14 days
  • $30/month after (with $60 and $100 tiers)

Similar to Prospect.io, Klenty is often listed as an email finder tool. They have a feature called “email cadences”, which helps you time automated follow-ups.

They have several positive reviews on their Pipedrive marketplace page. They also conveniently have a “comparison with Prospect.io” page.

Whichever email marketing tool you pick, make sure it integrates well with Pipedrive, seek to “minimize touch”, and have it push useful information directly to Pipedrive itself.

If you don’t have time to read through all the specifics above, here are our recommendations based on your needs:

  1. If you only send newsletters, perhaps with some sequences, use Campaigns by Pipedrive, Mailchimp or Sendinblue.
  2. If you’re primarily sending B2B drip campaigns, you can’t go wrong with Outfunnel’s email marketing tool, but Autopilot is worth considering as well.
  3. If you’re primarily (or only) sending cold emails, use Klenty or Overloop.

In 2022, there’s no reason why you should be wasting precious time and energy manually updating email lists. There’s also no reason why you shouldn’t have valuable information from your email lists pushed automatically to your sales CRM. These are glaring opportunities for lots of businesses to save time and get better sales results.

And to reiterate – when making sense of your email marketing, you should be thinking about what kind of email marketing you want to be doing. The tactics and tools and KPIs you use should follow from the particular brand of email marketing that applies to you!

If you’re looking for more than just email marketing, then read more about Pipedrive automations.

Web-related marketing integrations for Pipedrive

Once have your Pipedrive-email marketing solution sorted out, what do you do next?

According to our research, here are the features marketers most frequently look to set up on the web when it comes to marketing automation:

  • Lead capture forms: allow leads to indicate interest in your product or a piece of content
  • Web visitor tracking: seeing which lead visits which page on your site
  • Landing pages: create landing pages for certain topics or segments
  • Content personalization: customize content for specific segments or individual
  • Chat: human or robot powered interaction with leads on the site

Our favorite web-to-lead tools for Pipedrive marketing automation

Lead capture forms are simple and effective tools for building your email list. Here are some of our favorites that play well with Pipedrive.

1. Pipedrive’s native web forms are simple, robust and hassle-free

Pipedrive Web Form

If you’d need a simple web form with minimal integration hassle, you can’t go wrong with Pipedrive’s own web forms.

They’re customizable, robust, integrate directly to Pipedrive and they’re free.

2. Wix Forms

If your website is built on the Wix platform, then it’s easiest to use Wix Forms for your lead capture.

You can choose from a large variety of templates such as contact, order, registration, application, subscribe & more. The app also allows for easy customization of your form’s layout and design, so you can select exactly the fields you need your visitors to fill out.

While Wix Forms do not have a native integration with Pipedrive, you can use Outfunnel’s Wix Forms-Pipedrive connection to sync contacts from Wix Forms fills over to Pipedrive and record the form submissions on the contact profiles.

3. WordPress web forms: Contact Form 7, Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms or WPForms

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, and the ecosystem offers a variety of tools for web forms. The most popular ones include Contact Form 7 (which we use for some of our forms at Outfunnel), Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms and WPForms.

While the setup for each is slightly different, it’s nothing too complicated, especially if you’re already familiar with using WordPress.

The more complicated part is making the forms sync up with Pipedrive. A quick Google search will reveal a number of different plugins that offer such connections, but our (not completely unbiased) recommendation is to connect them via Outfunnel’s App connector. Here’s why:

  • Set up just once to sync contacts and log form fills for the contacts in Pipedrive.
  • Easily map any and all custom fields you’d like to be mapped to the respective properties in the CRM (some alternatives are only able to map 3-4 default fields).
  • One setup for any number of web forms on your domain (many others require a separate configuration per web form).
  • Track web visits of your contacts and record the visits in the CRM. (Coming soon)
  • Entire setup takes 15 minutes.
pipedrive and gravity forms connection

Read more about each WordPress web form connection and how they work:

4. Paperform is elegant and affordable ($15/mo), but has no integration with Pipedrive

While some of our simpler contact forms (e.g. our B2B email crash course) live on Contact Form 7, we use Paperform for more complex web forms.

We love the simplicity and design of Paperform, it’s also quite affordable (we’re using the $15 per month plan).

The only downside is that there is no native integration, so you’d need to send new leads to Pipedrive via Zapier or a comparable 3rd party syncing tool.

Find out more about forms you can use with Pipedrive

Website visitor tracking tools for Pipedrive

When you have a retail store that customers can walk into, you can learn a lot just from watching them. Where do they linger, what do they overlook? This can give you great insights into how you can improve the experience for them.

Can you do the same with your website? One effective way to do this is via tracking visitors that come to your website.

1. Outfunnel gives your sales team detailed context, automatically

Our own web visitor tracking software feature gives your sales team the context they need to prioritize leads and to know what to highlight or skip when they’re doing demos.

outfunnel web tracking visitor feed

Once you’ve enabled website visitor tracking, you’ll see who has been to your site, pages visited and the time of visits.

>> Try it out. Start your 14-day free trial now. <<

You’ll see a feed of web visitors when you log into Outfunnel, and you can also set up an automation that records these visits in Pipedrive.

Other Pipedrive marketing integrations?

Above, we’ve shortlisted key marketing automation tools that Pipedrive users can utilize. However, there are many more useful marketing integrations that we did not cover.

The thing is, we at Outfunnel are geeks about integrating sales and marketing. So much so, that our product is dedicated to connecting sales and marketing tools.

We have many more Pipedrive integrations that we can’t wait to share with you – Pipedrive integrations by Outfunnel.

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