Apollo.io vs. Customer.io

Apollo.io played big role for us in saving $$$ by bringing data mining, AI Email Writing and acting as CRM altogether...for small to medium organization they can surely rely on Apollo.io...and it is doing things mostly right with some room for improvement for sure. Sales and Marketing team saves time in getting their emails drafted based on prompts, list of contacts they can fetch in minutes of time, earlier we used to have seperate tool just to mine data, then we used to upload the CSV file to email marketing tool, then we used to draft email...for all these process we were using three different tools - Apollo.io brought everything under one umbrella.

Incentivized

Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.

Incentivized

• Firstly, finding the details of the potential customers that is there name, designation email and phone number since these are the most important cases most of the times I can get this data in Apollo.io
• I can pull the bulk data of the targeted organization, or I can pull the emails based on the location and job titles
• Apart from the email capture, the thing which helpful is that the email sequence can find emails and send emails in Apollo.io itself and also the report and the dashboard are so clean
• Friendly UI and UX Apollo.io was the first tool which I used. Since then I'm still using Apollo.io for easy understanding

Incentivized

• Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
• Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
• We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
• Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
• Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
• Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
• We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.

Incentivized

• There are certain features about prospecting that require updates. For example, if people switch organisations, it should be automatically requesting the new email or new contact data for a particular contact in order to be updated in the system
• The lead databases that are created if their new addition should automatically be updated in the list that I created with Apollo.io

Incentivized

• Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
• Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
• Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.

at this moment Apollo.io seems to be the perfect tool that has mastered all aspects of outbound marketing and CRM to handle and manage sales cycle.

Incentivized

Apollo.io does provide campaign setup help and made my SDRs team's life easier, with the use of lead enrichment, lead distribution, I can manage my team from a single dashboard. It also comes with CRM that helps me navigate the progress on leads and what my SDRs progress.

Incentivized

Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.

Incentivized

The team wants to solve probelms, but we are finding that they don't know how to solve the more technical issues quickly. I suspect that they don't have a mature process for escalations, and they don't have a usable knowledge base article repository. They seems to push emails around to let us know that people are working on the issues to find solutions, but this takes weeks and oftentimes still leaves us without a resolution.

Incentivized

My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io

Incentivized

All of these platforms are good and offer valuable tools, but where Apollo.io is different is how this one platform does the job of several different ones. It is nice not having to use multiple platforms to get things done and makes integration and analytics issues occur less often. It is user friendly and constantly working to improve.

Incentivized

Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.

Incentivized

• It provides more opportunities to gather more clients.
• It gives more results and better results in targeting our sales.
• It is a more effective way to provide information to a large number of potential clients about the events/ projects the company is offering.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
• Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
• Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.

Incentivized