Customer.io vs. Intuit Mailchimp vs. Printfection

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.

It allows you to reach out to our customer base and discuss updates, sales, education, and much more. I am grateful to have reached out to them and to have gained brand loyalty in the process. It helps us truly connect, not just sell. I can segment my audiences and decide who I want to send communications to.

Incentivized

It is well suited for a one-stop shop that gets everything done in one place (sizing, order, warehousing, shipping, drop-shipping, ability to do one-off orders, support in the process). It is less appropriate if you need something very specific and what they have doesn't work for you or if you like to be very involved in the complete process. It is also less appropriate if price is a major factor.

Incentivized

• 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

• Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
• Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
• Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.

Incentivized

• The swag catalogue has lots of items to choose from and they try to source anything else you need
• Takes care of the logistical challenges of getting swag to offices, events and to customers
• Their customer team are really hands on and helpful

Incentivized

• 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

• The pricing tiers do scale quickly so if you have a free newsletter it may get expensive
• The pricing is based on total emails so if you have users who you only email rarely it might not make sense to use Intuit Mailchimp
• Customer support can be a bit lacking at times and their docs aren't always the best

• Getting started, it took me a bit to navigate the various features of their platform as well as a few calls to customer support to help me find my way but after some practice I was able to navigate and found that the platform is pretty intuitive.

Incentivized

We love the product. One thing we haven't mentioned yet is the human element. Recently, MailChimp re-structured their plans/pricing based on the feedback they had received. They listened to a pain their users were experiencing, then strategized a solution, and implemented it fairly. The updated pricing strategy was intended to save subscribers money, and they did a great job of communicating it to their users. I would be surprised if anyone reacted negatively to the change.

We are currently extremely satisfied with printfection. The quality of swag is very good, but the customer service ranks high above any other swag company. I have been working closely with my Printfection manager (Tyler Rowland) and he has been more than helpful from the start.

Incentivized

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

It's very easy to use - I could quickly explain how to use Mailchimp to someone not in marketing and feel confident they'd be able to use basic skills to figure it out. Plus, we use it beyond just email marketing now for subscriber welcomes, forms, and nurture sequences.

Incentivized

The product is really easy to use and manage. We love using Printfection. It's easy to order, ship and manage everything. I did remove one rating point because their set up for "giveaways" is a little cumbersome and I wish their platform notified you when products in your giveaways are running low.

Incentivized

I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime

Incentivized

Prinfection's availability has been great. There was one time when a product we needed wasn't available, but our Printfection rep made sure to get what we needed.

Incentivized

I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools

Incentivized

Printfection's performance has been top-notch. We have been using Printfection for only about 8 months, and have not had any issues with performance.

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

Any time we needed their help or support they responded promptly, friendly, and straightforwardly. It's a great feature to have multi-language support as we are a diverse team, and anyone can reach out to receive help. We've always solved our inquires

Incentivized

Whenever I have a question or problem, I email and get a response by a knowledgeable rep (I believe we have a dedicated rep), that typically solves my issue at first pass. There's not a lot of back and forth. Also, they are FAST to respond. I'm really satisfied with their support team - I wish all companies' support teams were as speedy and helpful.

Incentivized

Tyler led some of our staff through training and was very helpful. Tyler was also always available for any questions after training was complete.

Incentivized

We completed online training with a Printfection rep leading us through the process. This made the whole experience easy and helpful.

Incentivized

I am little satisfied with the MailChimp implementation process, since although it has been a bit complicated and we have had various complications that tried to affect our performance, with a little general effort, we take full advantage and currently It is out main marketing and advertising campaign platform.

Incentivized

Their team is very helpful in getting set up and we felt like they worked with us on price and also getting our previous inventory we had at our offices set up in Printfection. The only down side of shipping in your items to Printfection is the photography of the items (which clients can see) is pretty terrible if you don't have clear product photos prior to sending the items to Printfection warehouse.

**All items purchased through Printfection the product photos look better (so this issue won't be the case with those who aren't shipping existing swag to their warehouse)

Incentivized

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

I used Intuit Mailchimp, and I would say other software I used is equally good and competes with Intuit Mailchimp. Well, Intuit Mailchimp's reporting is better, and ActiveCampaign has more affordable pricing, so in the end, it all comes to what you need. What we needed was available in cheaper price in other software as well. But I would definitely say Intuit Mailchimp has its own advantages too.

Incentivized

I reserached swag platforms and narrowed it down to 3 that I wanted to learn more about. I based my choices on response time to demo requests, customer service, items, ability to meet the needs of my supervisor, etc. I learned that 2 out of the 3 platforms I found were both under Custom Ink which I have used in the past. So I know the items are of good quality. The main deciding factor was the staff. Both companies had nice staff. But Printfection did a superb job of not making me feel like a cutomer but a friend. I didn't fee like I was a sale but a partner.

Incentivized

Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.

Incentivized

Only a few of our departments will be using Printfection, (like HR and Customer Success), but both departments find Printfection flexible and scalable.

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

• One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
• Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.

Incentivized

• Printfection is far more expensive than what we were previously using and we haven't seen a huge ROI yet in terms of influence on pipeline.
• Our employees are more engaged using Printfection than they were with our previous tool.
• Printfection helps with product design and research which saves me a ton of time when selecting new items.

Incentivized