Customer.io vs. Dotdigital

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

DotDigital has a drag-and-drop email builder and many good templates. Using automation, I was able to send out emails with ease. During the onboarding process, you will also be able to speak with real people. We use it to create modern and engaging emails for customers, whether abandoned cart or post-purchase. It has excellent reporting modules, but it lacks a few fundamentals, which can be frustrating. As a whole, the partnership has been a success so far.

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

• Email Campaigns are simple and easy to crease
• We use the SMS to alert our customers to any technical issues
• Good support from account managers

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.

• API limits: There is a hardcoded limit on how many API calls you can make per hour, and to raise it, you have to pay.
• The API set is very limited in general.
• The API set is very limited in general

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

DotDigital is not difficult to use, however, the user interface could use some optimization. There are certain elements that can be challenging to find, and the menus are not always intuitive. However, the tool makes up for that with easy to use features, like creating segments, and allowing many rules to specify these particular groups.

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

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

DotDigital's platform is simple to use for essential email marketing campaigns. Setting up Programs (action-driven automation) is simple. It gives you the ability to design stunning campaigns with a wide range of customizability. To better understand our customer base, it analyzes each email sent out. In every situation, the support team has been responsive and helpful.

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

• Maintenance costs due to integration limits.
• API tiers (now formalized in the documentation) were discovered after the initial purchase, so there are more recurring costs.
• In general, a raise of costs in the IT compartment, while it can benefit marketing.

Incentivized