Customer.io vs. Keap

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

Keap is very good at contact management and automation creation but weaker at email campaign creation. I was particularly interested in a function where when manually entering a new contact, you are then able to email that contact using a premade HTML template. It will currently not do this. There is a workaround, but it is unnecessarily ponderous.

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

• Pricing: Keap Max Classic (formerly Infusionsoft) is affordable for nonprofits and small businesses and includes all the automation features we need!
• Customer Support: Our onboarding and success coaches have been so helpful, taking into account some unique processes we have and finding solutions.
• Updates: Keap is constantly providing more and better solutions!

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.

• More articles and videos on how to use the various functions of Keap
• Having representatives designated to certain regions or companies for a point of contact when help is needed
• More options when building the emails. While the click and drop options can be a plus, they can also be negative because you are limited to image and text sizing and positions

We have invested a lot into Infusionsoft and are using it to automate our processes and marketing. Changing CRMs would have a HUGE cost for us and based on our evaluations, the grass isn't greener elsewhere. Infusiosoft fits most of our needs and is slowly getting better each year. Their support is great and we will continue to use them until something much better comes around or our company outgrows a small business CRM.

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

You do need to spend some time on-boarding and implementing the software in order to have full functionality. We were lucky - we had colleagues at the university with experience with Keap and then hired an intern familiar with the software to get us set up and ready to use it. We've had some functionality issues with it along the way and that has frustrated myself and the other uses in our department.

Incentivized

There have been few outages since we became a customer, and when they have technical issues they are typically resolved rapidly.

OMG, it's all in one and that compromises everything, fundamentally. If you want a race car, invest in a race car. If you want a dune buggy, get that. If you want a boat that floats, go for it.

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

Generally, very responsive support for even our more complicated issues. We do have some open issues that we need resolutions on and that I understand are complicated and will take longer to resolve but the open issues are significantly impacting to our business.

Incentivized

I have been to a number of in-person training sessions over the years with Keap and all of them have been FANTASTIC. They really put a lot of time and effort into these sessions. Staff and facilitators go out of their way to ensure that participants are getting what they need.

Incentivized

The results of training online are often based on how people learn. The training was great but with feature updates, you just have to get in there sometimes and do it! The training definitely lays a firm enough foundation for you to be successful even if its can't be updated with every feature update.

Don't let the fear of implementing a new software solution keep you from unleashing the power of automation that Infusionsoft provides. With the right implementation partner, the process can not only be smooth and painless, it can actually help you get a better understanding for how your current communication process can be improved upon.

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

Keap is fast. The learning curve is shorter and they have an academy for learning with videos quite extensive that explain a lot of different scenarios, specially when you need to customize scenarios of automations and segments. Is cheaper if you consider that this services CRM + Mailing don´t come often in one package and the realiability to send mails is quite good.

Incentivized

You get a lot of features included, but you don't need to use them all at once to start seeing an effect. When you are ready to use them, they are there. It also scales without costing too much money.

• 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

• Automation has allowed us to be more engaged and invested in our customers by reminding us about birthdays and other important events in their lives so that we can celebrate with them.
• We lacked the manpower to sell and distribute orders online before setting up the payments and automation features. We now collect $5k+ a week in lost sales through online ordering.
• List cleaning functionality and engagment settings have allowed us to run a 40-50% email open rate that allows us to create an engaged community around local events and opportunities as well as sales and special offerings.

Incentivized