Customer.io vs. ReachMail

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

The free Reachmail account (which I have used for several small organizations) is a good tool where there are limited or zero email marketing dollars, a contact audience of up to 5,000 subscribers, and a max of 15,000 monthly emails. The pricing levels are really reasonable for volume requirements, including custom plans for infrequent mailings. If there are constraints (time and/or design experience) that require a large choice of ready-made contemporary templates without graphic or font modifications, then this probably isn't a good email marketing tool.

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

• I have a $10 account, but customer support treat me like a princess. They even added a feature to one page to remedy a problem I was having with that page. They care about their customers.
• ReachMail Features (or at least, these are the ones I know they have): WYSIWYG Email Editor, Template Management, Mobile Optimized Emails, Dynamic Content, Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Mailing List Management, Drip Campaigns, Auto-Responders, Image Library, A/B Testing, Customer Surveys, CAN SPAM Compliance, Reporting/Analytics.
• These folks know what they’re doing. I can’t speak highly enough about ReachMail.

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.

• There are no batch report downloads. When I have multiple variations and waves in a campaign, I have to download reports individually. I'd like for a way to download one report of all sends during a certain time period, or given another set of parameters.
• It would save a lot of time if we had the ability to upload multiple images or assets at once.
• There's only a two-level "tree" of organization of lists and suppression lists. It would be great if we had the abililty to nest lists into better categories, rather than having to scroll through one giant list of suppressions or deployment lists. Something like a 2015 folder, then inside that a Business Unit folder, then inside that, a Campaign folder, etc. This would make things much easier to find.

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

Their team is knowledgable and willing to help offer insight and support to build out the right campaigns to fit our business needs and goals

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

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

In my opinion, ReachMail is a good competitor to Mailchimp, probably has more features though and analytics to help organize information. There are also a lot more third party integrations that have helped us compared to other apps that we've tried before, but ReachMail has been the most useful, for me personally and my team

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

• None. I signed up for a pay account so only had to spend a dollar for the first month. Even that was a waste as I simply can't send emails out with their forced unsubscribe header. If it was the typical CAN-SPAM footer it would be fine, but it just looks awful.

Incentivized