Customer.io vs. Intuit Mailchimp vs. Robly

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

For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.

Incentivized

I would absolutely recommend Robly to my colleagues. I have used Robly for over six years now and have found so many positives over my years of using it! It provides an easy way for us to keep our contacts organized, and we can easily embed forms into our website. When comparing Robly's pricing options with other email platforms, it won by a landslide. Some small aspects of the program may seem a little outdated, but I have everything I need and more!

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

• 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

• Robly constantly updates the status information of each email that is sent from its platform, which helps to ensure that there are no problems reviewing the number of people among the targets that could be interested in our service or product, and become customers, when it is necessary to identify them from those who are not, and that otherwise would cause high error margins in the reports.
• The software has a visual power that is very easy to extend through third-party platforms, allowing us to create content in services such as Photoshop, which we can then include in mailings, although it is also feasible to import the content in the traditional way, through image formats. Among these, the best one to work with is PNG, which allows us to remove the background content so that the important section of the image fits better with the format of the e-mails.
• Robly works with services based on the optimization of group projects, whose integration serves to send emails to all participants equally, and that these are kept constantly notified about updates to the work, and can be coupled well in advance to these updates, so that no confusion arises at the time of unifying the work sent and points within the same should not be exposed.
• In reality, Robly's technical support is something we have never had the opportunity to interact with, as the platform is not so buggy that we would need to contact them for advice. In any case, they are likely to show promising results considering the quality of the service.
• It has been very easy to get familiar with the functions Robly has to work with advanced email address database configurations without losing track of the progress of each campaign, and this is thanks to the well-optimized structure of the platform.

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.

• 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

• I don't have many cons for Robly. One thing that would be helpful is concerning adding a set of emails to the contact list. It would be nice to receive a list of emails that are not added and a reason why (e.g., duplicate, etc.).
• I have noticed that when I am editing an email campaign, at times it will unexpectedly stop showing me the text editing menu bar, and there doesn't seem to be a way to call it back up. This can be resolved by saving and exiting the campaign and then reopening, but it breaks into my work flow and is an inconvenience. I have not been able to find a pattern for the occurrence of the glitch.

Incentivized

We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.

Incentivized

Because we like the price and value. The annual subscription model allows us to maximize usage without worrying too much about cost, being a small mom and pop outfit.

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

The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.

Incentivized

Overall Robly's usability can be considered easy and intuitive. For experienced marketing professionals this program would not be challenging to navigate even on the first uses. There may be a slight learning curve for amateur users but overall it is fairly simple and easy to use and creates professional results.

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

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

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

Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!

Incentivized

We sometimes got through to a message taking service but they were not able to resolve our issue with a one-call solution necessarily always.

It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.

Incentivized

We should have been granted a MOBILE RESPONSIVE email template from the get-go. We were never offered any alternatives.

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

I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.

Incentivized

Robly has much of the same functionality as Constant Contact. I find Robly's interface to be more intuitive. Robly allows us to upload as many images and documents as we want, without charging us extra. Robly's subscription price is lower than Constant Contact. Their newsletter archiving is also more robust. With Constant Contact, I felt "nickled and dimed." Not only is Robly's base price lower, it's the price! You can upgrade to unlock more sophisticated features.

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

• 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

• There has been an increase in revenue in the last month, which is reflected in our ROI of 300%.
• Results are shown quickly, although this depends directly on the investment made in the platform (the $15 price is only for the base plan).

Incentivized