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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Customer.io

    Score9.1 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

    Emma by Marigold

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AEmma by Marigold is an email marketing solution. Its key features include mobile-ready design templates, email automation, audience segmentation, and dynamic content. The software includes integration with third-party CRM solutions, ecommerce platforms, and social networks.

    $500

    per year per user

    Pricing
    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Basic
    $500
    per year per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsEssentials: 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.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Considered Both Products
    Customer.io
    Chose Customer.io
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Marigold
    Chose Emma by Marigold
    We chose Emma in addition to Sendgrid to protect the integrity of our transactional email deliverability. Emma's delivery rates were good. We later found MailChimp a bit cheaper and easier to work with in our specific use case but I still think it's worth testing Emma if you're …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Email & Online Marketing
    Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Customer.io and Emma by Marigold
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Emma by Marigold
    9.1
    31 Ratings
    12% above category average
    WYSIWYG email editor00 Ratings8.024 Ratings
    Dynamic content00 Ratings9.025 Ratings
    Ability to test dynamic content00 Ratings9.024 Ratings
    A/B testing00 Ratings9.024 Ratings
    Mobile optimization00 Ratings9.029 Ratings
    Email deliverability reporting00 Ratings10.031 Ratings
    List management00 Ratings10.031 Ratings
    Triggered drip sequences00 Ratings9.021 Ratings
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Customer.io and Emma by Marigold
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Emma by Marigold
    10.0
    31 Ratings
    26% above category average
    Dashboards00 Ratings10.030 Ratings
    Standard reports00 Ratings9.931 Ratings
    Custom reports00 Ratings10.019 Ratings
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    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Small Businesses
    Simplify360
    Score7.8 out of 10
    Mad Mimi
    Score10 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Braze
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Campaign Monitor by Marigold
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP Service Cloud
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Litmus from Validity
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (20 ratings)
    8.0
    (32 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.5
    (5 ratings)
    Usability
    9.2
    (12 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    2.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Customer.ioEmma by Marigold
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Customer.io
    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
    Read full review
    Marigold
    Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Customer.io
    • 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
    Read full review
    Marigold
    • Enterprise-level email marketing with multi-level account structure allowing for multiple users at different levels to send campaigns
    • Easy-to-use WYSIWYG email template editors to create dynamic emails with enhanced personalization through merge-fields
    • A large API index that connects to many different platforms and the ability to work with Emma support to create new connections to new platforms as needed
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Customer.io
    • 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.
    Read full review
    Marigold
    • Their customer service leaves something to be desired. We ran into an issue with one of our campaigns, and we decided to reach out to support, but they didn't get back with us until 3 hours later! Time is money!!
    • We don't like that their photo editing capabilities are limited, you can only choose small, medium or large photos with no way to resize to exact dimensions. Makes emails a bit of a pain
    • The upgraded premium tools are buggy and leave something to be desired as well – it's a shame.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Marigold
    Emma has been a great tool for our marketing. It's easy to use and I've had no issues in the almost two years we've been with them. It's really been a great way for us to stay connected with customers that takes no time to setup and send
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Customer.io
    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
    Read full review
    Marigold
    While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Customer.io
    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
    Read full review
    Marigold
    I hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Customer.io
    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
    Read full review
    Marigold
    At the time we made the decision to move to Emma, my organization was using both MailChimp and Constant Contact. Emma's drag-and-drop template editor surpassed both, and even editing the pre-made template HTML in Emma was easier. List management was much smoother than the clunky Constant Contact and MailChimp lists we had. From a design perspective, we chose Emma for its ease of use in creating templates and modifying existing ones, as well as the ability to push out branded templates and brand assets through its master admin/subaccount capabilities. Emma's analytics and reporting were much less frustrating to navigate and understand, such that, rather than spending all of our time trying to make sense of the metrics from a campaign (which we were definitely doing), we were attracted to being able to report easily and then move on to determining how to make real improvements
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Customer.io
    • 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
    Read full review
    Marigold
    • Stores using the platform have seen good deliverability stats. Open rates and click-through rates are high with the templates that Emma creates. We still face the challenge of getting more users on the platform.
    • User satisfaction is high for our users who are regularly using the platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Customer.io Screenshots

    Screenshot of data-driven or manual segments that can be created in the no-code builder for recipient lists, campaign triggers, filters, and conversion goals.Screenshot of the code editor for email, that helps navigate code and iterate.Screenshot of account performance, visible at a glance from the Dashboard view.Screenshot of drag and drop messages, time delays, and branches where desired, to build cross-channel campaigns.Screenshot of triggered campaigns based on forms submissions, customer attributes, customer actions, and dates.Screenshot of localization for global audiences. One message can be delivered in multiple languages.

    Emma by Marigold Screenshots

    Screenshot of dynamic content used to send unique, personalized content to each subscriber based on the data stored about them from a single email.Screenshot of the editor's drag & drop layouts and inline text editing, that help to keep the creative process fast and flexible.Screenshot of a display of account activity, email performance and recent mailings in one place right after login.Screenshot of insights on the go using Metric, the included iPhone and Android app.Screenshot of response results that give insights into what's working and provide next steps.Screenshot of customizable, mobile-optimized templates to show off a brand and content in the template gallery.