Conversica provides lead management software for marketing, inside sales and sales groups.
$1,499
per installation
Customer.io
Score 9.1 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to build sophisticated automated messaging campaigns. With access to real-time behavioral data, users can create personalized and relevant messages to engage and retain customers. This includes sending emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and more through a visual building experience. Built for scale, Customer.io boasts users among over 5,300 companies, sending over 17 billion messages per year.
$100
per month
Pricing
Conversica
Customer.io
Editions & Modules
Starter Edition
$1,499
per installation
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Conversica
Customer.io
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
A Conversica subscription includes an unlimited number of seats for marketers, sales reps and managers. Different editions include different levels of functionality to match your needs. The service is a monthly subscription with an annual commitment.
Essentials: For startups and small teams engaging customers on their mobile and web apps.
- Up to 5,000 profiles*, Send Emails, Push, In-App, and SMS, Visual Workflow Builder, Segmentation, Two Workspaces, Email Support, Customer Community
Premium: For high-growth companies looking for greater control over their messaging outcomes.
- Everything in Essentials, Custom Data + Message Volume, Premium Product Features, Additional Workspaces, 90-day Onboarding Program, Premium Email & Chat Support, Managed Deliverability, Dedicated IPs, Parcel Pro Licenses, HIPAA Compliance
Enterprise: For at-scale companies looking to create world-class customer experiences.
- Everything in Premium, Managed Infrastructure*, Customer Success Manager, Quarterly Success Reviews, Technical Account Manager*, Audit Logging & Data Governance*, Parcel Business Licenses, Migration Support*, *Available by consultation.
Conversica is an excellent tool if you have a large database of potential students, sales leads, or other forms of potential customers/users. It does not replace human interaction, but instead supplements it - allowing your admissions/sales/retention team to spend their time with those individuals that are in most need of assistance - whether that be because they are "hot leads" for a sale, students with a sincere interest, or customers needing assistance beyond the capabilities of an automatic system.
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.
Conversica is great at working low level leads and surfacing those that are in fact interested in your product or service.
Conversica is also useful in weeding out leads that are not strong.
Since Conversica is sending emails to various prospects, customers and opportunities, it allows sales, account managers, service etc, to focus on other activities, thereby saving time and freeing up resources.
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.
The method of standing up campaigns can be a little tedious for administrators because it uses copy/paste of Salesforce Campaign ID instead of just searching for active Salesforce campaigns.
Understanding the conversation path options that the AI could take is improving greatly, but can still use some improvements for admin awareness when standing up a new conversation.
Understanding what conversation types exist and how they differ from one another is sometimes difficult to self-serv, but the Conversica team is always very good about helping out explaining these.
Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.
Everything was pretty intuitive to use if you've used an ESP before. The only thing that was confusing is Campaigns vs Newsletters - some of their naming conventions aren't straightforward. But their docs, support and AI agents are all super solid.
Our account manager and support rep have been extremely helpful in helping us get the system where we wanted it. Given our original use case as a lead qualifier, a lot of the conversations needed to be altered or exceptions created in order to provide the customization we needed. Our AM and support rep were able to accommodate most of our requests and were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution.
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
The implementation went smoothly. The only advice I would give for anybody looking to integrate Conversica with Salesforce is to ensure that either you or somebody within your organization has experience with process builder as you'll need to create some processes to force your leads into Salesforce campaigns for the Conversica system to pick them up.
I haven't looked into many other conversational ai products - we received a solid recommendation about using this and have been happy with the process and experience. Price was also pretty good, so we didn't feel a need to shop around on that front. If things change I'll do that homework, but we're happy for now
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.
We have found that each conversation type has a different ROI. Some are very hard to report off of, whereas others are easy. this is because some are more built around building awareness of what we offer where they may not purchase it for months down the line.
Has helped us to save on salaries. If staff were to try to do the same thing our AI Assistant does, it would take them many hours to be as successful.
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.
