Customer.io vs Outreach

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.

In my opinion, Outreach is well suited for an enterprise sales team of 50+ users - otherwise, I feel you are unseen/unheard/unappreciated, and customer support is not offered for smaller scale teams. Outreach is well suited for outbound sales that offer simple solutions that can be communicated quickly and efficiently via cold email outreach.

• 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.

• Organization - I know when to make calls/emails/LinkedIn connections without having to overthink anything.
• Alignment - the colleagues I work with on my accounts can keep tabs on my activity so there is no redundancy or overcommunication.
• Ease of use - all my contacts are in one place, and sending automated emails I have built in my sequences give me so much time back in my day.

• Push notifications are very rudimentary. Everything has to be done by hand unless you're sending an extremely simple message.
• A bit too email centric.
• Lacks an ability to schedule messages on a daily, weekly, etc. basis.

• Triggers can be a little tricky to figure out - some limitations are not intuitive
• User management through Salesforce feature - our process is to Freeze Salesforce accounts before deactivating them to ensure account/opportunity/contact migrations have fully taken place; Outreach will only remove licenses from deactivated users, which could be frustrating if we were already at our license cap and needed to add more users in that interim.

I like Outreach, but I do wonder about new competitors that are 25-50% less expensive.

The ease of use for outreach is next to none. Everything is clearly explained, you can hop on a call with their support team whenever, and it effortlessly integrates into your computer. You can do everything you need sales related on it, and the learning curve is small. I'd recommend it as a first and last CRM.

The overall support of Outreach has been great. Whenever I have a problem, they were quick to fix it and typically respond within one business day. I don't typically have many requests for support because a lot of my questions can be answered through their knowledge panel. They have been fantastic to work with overall.

Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.

Although we required a special setup, the process was quick. But we paid a lot for the implementation and didn't use 33% of the hours we purchased.

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.

Outreach does a great job being a one-stop-shop for all of your tools in one platform to help your SDR's and AE build pipelines and simplifying the process of nurturing/maintain communication with your contacts. You won't need to use other sales enablement tools with outreach. You'll be able to build sequences using 3 different channels of LinkedIn, emailing, and calls in one platform. You'll also be able to view overall insights of what sequences are performing well, how they are successful.

• Fast testing for new products to specific groups. It saves a lot of time and money.
• Removed workload from marketing = more time to make it better.
• Better contact with specific groups, seeing a increase in sales because of this.

• The huge positive impact it had was the team not needing to spend as much time as disengaged opps as they were engaged ones. We were able to set sequences to work with them while the team could focus on generating new leads or converting Opps.
• For an AE - post demo communication is important. With templates and snippets we could just click a few buttons and have a really nice email sent out with the relevant information and then the next several steps already planned out. This freed up time for us and even allowed us to take calls a lot sooner after demo's then before. For busy days this was very helpful.