Customer.io vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing

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

Having used both Salesforce and Microsoft Marketing, the integration is much tighter and the automation and workflow is much tighter using PowerAutomate. Reporting on tasks is better in Salesforce, but the ability to fully and quickly integrate into the Microsoft Azure stack is well worth the hassle of quickly generating reports.

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

• Builds dynamic audiences using real-time CRM and behavioral data without manual list maintenance.
• Triggers communications based on actions such as purchase, visit date, or post-visit timing.
• Manages high-volume transactional and lifecycle emails with consistent governance and compliance.

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.

• Currently marketing is more contact centric, should add the flexibility of doing segmentation as well as customer journey on leads without associating with contact
• Pricing is based on number of contact, even if you are not marketing all of them.
• Cannot reuse the existing marketing lists created in CRM for marketing as seamlessly as in ClickDimensions, even though both uses the same Dataverse

Incentivized

I wouldn't even think of renewing our use of Marketing 365. It's worthless

Everything was pretty intuitive to use if you've used an ESP before. The only thing that was confusing is Campaigns vs Newsletters - some of their naming conventions aren't straightforward. But their docs, support and AI agents are all super solid.

Incentivized

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is extremely usable in order to manage all of my organization's customer information across the organization. Further we use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to manage all of our marketing campaigns from beginning to end. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing makes my organization more able to run a professional marketing strategy.

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

Like all Microsoft corporation products, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing comes with the extremely high-quality customer support that Microsoft corporation has become well known for. Whether it is the availability of twenty-four/seven customer support or the highly-trained, very friendly customer support personnel, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has the support you are looking for.

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

While the cost was significantly more than other vendors we looked at, the tools are similar to our previous tool so conversion would be (somewhat) easy. We chose it because it directly integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - which we integrated at the same time.

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

• It took a few months to get things in order and I believe I could’ve gotten started sooner, but I had to learn about it first

Incentivized