Customer.io vs. Swag Pro

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

B2B companies, SaaS companies, larger or important swag or customer gifting motions, ABM strategies, large customer thank you motions, certification programs where earners are thanked or rewarded, lean teams, ample budgets, field sales teams with agency of gifting and swag, marketing teams that don't have room or space for holding or managing inventory

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

• 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

• 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.

• Their Giveaway feature was made some improvements but I would like to see it be more flexible
• Being able to get more samples of products and printing prior to ordering
• Swag photography/ items in stock in our closet- we had to provide photos of these items
• Better updates on swag items that are low in stock

Incentivized

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

I think they do their work well. It's just not amazing or a company I feel a necessity to keep. If someone had the same service with the same cost, I might suggest asking both about the level of customer service.

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

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

They're willing to help and do what is necessary, even when unnecessary. This is the case when I don't need service at that level, but I'd rather have excellent service always than wonder if it will be there when I need it. Overall, they are perfect, and they have good intentions.

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

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

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 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

Simple pricing and easy to pitch to stakeholders

Incentivized

Only two departments use this product effectively. Ideally we have two other departments would use it, but they kept getting confused on how to navigate through it.

Incentivized

There aren't many professional services besides what is related to their product. What would have been great was to get design services included in our membership since we dont have one in house

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

• 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