Customer.io vs. Net-Results

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

Net-Results is very well-suited for small, medium and large businesses. They seem to be more advanced than what a typical enterprise level implementation would require. When selecting a marketing automation provider make it a point to find out the level of integration with Salesforce and other marketing technologies. Do they have pre-built automation modules or does it require building from the ground up? Also ask questions regarding its specific capabilities ... for example: is it a marketing automation provider? is it a CRM provider? etc

• 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

• Automated emails in a drip campaign that Sales can remove people from.
• Lead scoring and alerts that go right to the lead owner.
• Weekly reports to each Sales person with their hottest lead.
• Very finely tuned segments that can be used for alerts, emails, and scheduled reports.
• Integration with Salesforce. The Sales team can basically trigger their own emails.

• 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.

• Forms: Would love to have dependent fields, also ability to see all data a user entered without having to create a custom field for every form.
• Campaign branching: Criteria need to be selected one at a time, which can be very time-consuming.

Net-Results does what we need and is straightforward to use. Their team has been very responsive to our requests and great to work with.

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

Net Results is pretty easy to use and understand. I wouldn't say that it is the best in comparison to MailChimp's drag and drop email builder, but Net Results do so much more than MailChimp that it is hard to even compare the two. Overall Net Results has good usability

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

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

We've used ClickDimensions and Marketo. We felt that ClickDimensions was more limited as far as creating effective email campaigns and not as easy to use. It also is completely native to Dynamics CRM, which can be a positive and a negative. Marketo was the previous solution we owned, we are much happier with Net-Results. It's easier to use, not as complex and there is much better communication from their support team. When looking at a new solution we also looked at Act-On and Hubspot. Act-On probably would've been our second choice, but it didn't have as modern of a feel and wasn't quite as easy to use. Hubspot didn't really fit our business. It was very focused on SEO and blog posts. It didn't have the features we needed from a marketing standpoint

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

• Stronger re-engagement rates - The buy cycle for our product can be very long. Net-Results helps us keep in touch with prospects that may have gone cold.
• Better asset utilization - Net-Results helps us drive continuous utilization of our assets.
• Efficiency - The automation Net-Results has provided means we can focus on other tasks, like creating new assets or building new partnerships.