APSIS Pro vs. Customer.io

Works well, relatively easy to use - but lacks some up-to-date and modern features as well as look and feel. The support provided is OK but not world class. It is too bad as APSIS as a company is quite good at inspiring and providing insights into trends in email marketing.

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

• We have a pre-designed template and pre-build elements and thus it is quite easy to compose nice looking newsletters.
• Doing split-tests on subject, clicks etc. is quite easy and requires no tech help.
• Imporing new contacts and adding to the list is straight forward.

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

• The user interface is not good. Too much scrolling and too many menues to navigate. Half of the pages are updated to a "new" look with the rest still being the (really) old design. This badly needs a make-over.
• There is no one-click "send reminder to those who did not open". To send reminders, it is nescessary to build a filter a do a new send using the filter. Such a simple and often repeated task should be automated.
• It is not possible to add a "Why did you leave us?"-page for opt-outs... Really misses this.
• The statistics are too limited and to difficult to use - mostly due to the UI design as described above.

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.

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

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

MailChimp offers more flexibilty but also seems a bit more complicated to use. We did not use it long enough to really get an idea of the positive and negative.

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

• We are still trying to figure out how to use this medium for sales. We have had some success with Black Monday sales, but in general we do not have much response to our emails.
• We have increases our visibility with our customers by making sure to land in their mailbox regulary with nice looking messages.

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