Customer.io vs. Iterable

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.

Iterable is great for email marketers that are not advanced/technical in emails. They made it very simple to create emails and run campaigns. Everything about Iterable is very easy - from creating emails with drag and drop functionality, segmenting and creating send lists, and even setting up a journey. The only downside with Iterable is that it's mainly meant for larger companies. There are better platforms if you're using email in a very simple way.

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

• It makes designing and deploying great looking emails easy with their drag-and-drop technology and framework.
• Iterable allows for great customization and time-saving with the use of their handlebar snippets. This has revolutionized how we are able to monetize our editorial audiences using clear logic that helps us get the most for each of our conversion efforts.
• The various ways that you can run and view reports is incredibly helpful, and easy to customize. This means we can find most of the data we want and need across our various departments with their differing goals without having to piecemeal together crazy solutions or waste time reinventing the wheel.

Incentivized

• Push notifications are very rudimentary. Everything has to be done by hand unless you're sending an extremely simple message.
• A bit too email centric.
• Lacks an ability to schedule messages on a daily, weekly, etc. basis.

Incentivized

• Some of Iterable's user interface in Journey is a little confusing. This is a personal preference.
• Their image uploading is very basic - but they are working on releasing a new version soon.
• It's difficult to look up a specific contact by only being able to search their email. I wish I could search by name without having to use segmentation

Incentivized

Extremely easy to use, deeply integrated into our infrastructure

Iterable very easy to learn and use. It's a great platform for both a new email marketer and a marketer that's been working in email for 20+ years.

Incentivized

Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.

Incentivized

The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.

Incentivized

I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.

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

The visualization tools in iterable for creating journeys are so much easier to use and adjust than in Marketo, Mailgun, or Mailjet. We have better performance metrics tracking in particular than in Mailjet or Marketo. It is also easier to see where we have made mistakes in emails and to adjust the code visually than in any of the other platforms

Incentivized

We've never run into any issues with volume. Iterable is always able to handle everything we throw at it. We utilize webhooks and emails. Both perform very well. Webhooks actually perform too quickly and downstream systems need to be able to handle the volume throughput that Iterable can send.

Incentivized

• Fast testing for new products to specific groups. It saves a lot of time and money.
• Removed workload from marketing = more time to make it better.
• Better contact with specific groups, seeing a increase in sales because of this.

Incentivized

• This is a hard thing to qualify with the short amount of time we have had on the platform and with the changes that have occurred since onboarding. iOS 15 was released, so we are learning new ways of measuring the ROI.
• The ease of integration with other tools has helped us begin to break into more personalized emails for our customers. We have really only scratched the surface and have so much farther to go!

Incentivized