Customer.io vs. Retainly

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.

Retainly allowed me to take customer engagement to the next level. I felt an advantage of its low-code functionality, user-friendliness, intuitive automation, and pre-built integrations with a range of other marketing tools. I saw a noticeable difference in my marketing performance and customer retention results after almost 2 months of usage. As a marketer, I managed to automate heavy manual effort to run marketing my campaigns.

• 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

• Segments creation
• Workflow creation
• Workspace creation

• 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.

Incentivized

• Analytics can be improved

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

Retainly has a unique and better workflow creation process.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Set - up automated workflow sequences across the customer journey
• Less manual intervention to manage campaign
• 15 % Reduce of drop-offs in the customer experience