Customer.io vs. eTrigue DemandCenter

This tool is well-suited for companies looking to run email marketing campaigns or send out newsletters regularly to their users/customers. The workflow setup is especially useful for companies who want to send specific emails based on user behavior - i.e. they've not logged in recently, have bought a specific product, haven't opened any emails, etc. This could also be useful for freelancers like me since you can create different workspaces within Customer.io. I have configured it this way to handle email marketing for a few of my clients, and the software keeps everything organized and separate. This might not be the best tool for small businesses, considering the price. It may be better to start out with a cheaper email marketing tool, and then if/when necessary, scale-up with a tool like Customer.io.

I would not recommend DemandCenter for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing or what they want. That sounds like a no-brainer, but it seems like a huge number of organizations want something to fill that "Marketing Automation" gap, not having the marketing infrastructure in place to support it. That is, a technically savvy person to design complex campaign logic and manage data, good web people for designing landing pages and emails, and content writers & managers & marketing specialists for everything else. Investing in a marketing automation tool does not mean you can exclude these resources - it simply means you can DO MORE with those resources. If you don't know what you want, and want to be babysat through the whole process but don't mind the limitations, you can always go with the MA tool that rhymes with "BubSpot".

• Ease of use, a good tool for non programmers, or not so tech savvy people.
• Great support, willing to help a lot, by chat, calls, or screen sharing.
• Fast updates, it's a newer tool, but they are coming with fixes and updates fast.

Incentivized

• Putting prospects in the system from spreadsheets is easy. Contacts can also be automatically brought into eTrigue from your CRM. (If you have Salesforce.)
• Campaign reports show the actual numbers of prospects at each step of the campaign. The detail behind the number is available just by clicking on it.

• Customer.io needs to be more known! I don't know why they don't come up as a direct competitor to Iterable and Braze.
• Their new Design Studio drag + drop tool could be improved with further customization.
• Reports aren't the strongest - I use Amplitude to do all my Customer.io reporting.

Incentivized

• I wish they could be able to customize URLs for landing pages for better SEO and branding.
• Better SEO functionality and ability to customize those options on landing pages would be nice.
• More useful and better detailed analytics would be nice.

Incentivized

We rely on this tool. Going forward as we implement new back end architecture we may be forced to change to an integrated platform with our master data management infrastructure, but we will do so kicking and screaming. While marketing gets to make the choice, we will choose eTrigue.

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

Having used Marketo, Act-On, and Pardot, eTrigue is MUCH easier to use and easier to train new team members to use.

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

Been very happy with their responsiveness and ability to resolve issues

You will need to think about which users you want to have each role, and the features allowed in each role. You should watch the training videos before you get live training. It saved us several hours as they had already answered 90% of our questions.

I have tried multiple email marketing software, including MailChimp, ConvertKit, CustomerIO, and HubSpot, but I really liked how CustomerIO solved our problem. They were all somehow solving our problem, but lacked a few things here and there. For instance, ConvertKit’s forte is newsletter emails and landing pages that it creates for you. It wasn’t a desiccated email software company. HubSpot was good, but with CustomerIO’s recent AI updates, I like it much better. Plus, support is impeccable.

Incentivized

As an agency we have experience with several other marketing automation platforms. We support clients that are not using eTrigue DemandCenter-- we'll work with them to create various campaign assets. This said, if our clients want us to also run their marketing automation campaigns-- implement the campaigns after the assets are created, we only work in eTrigue as this our platform of choice. Our ability to support the robust and fast-paced needs of our clients requires us to use a platform that they can easily implement and that we can easily work in, make ongoing changes in. eTrigue DemandCenter is the platform that delivers.

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

• We get the upper hand on follow-up with return visitors... not by reverse DNS lookup or pattern match but by direct cookie validation. Inside sales productivity is boosted by 33% easy with eTrigue.
• The alerts and data are lightning fast, giving marketing immediate feedback on campaign data and prospects.