Customer.io vs. Marigold Engage by Sailthru

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.

Sailthu is perfectly suited, no matter what level of technical skill you have or support from an Engineering team. That said, it includes many advanced features which can only be fully utilized when integrated with custom webhooks and after receiving customer data sent via their APIs. There may be easier solutions out there for less technical users or for people wanting a simpler setup to begin with.

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

• Personalization - one of the most important things you can utilize when emailing people.
• Segmentation - Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based off their criteria; there are so many different fields to choose from. We use this mostly for geo-targeting and engagement.
• Analytics - post-campaign analytics are very easy to look at, customize your view, and download as a csv to share with your team and company.

Incentivized

• 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

• Giving more practical examples of technical setups, sometimes the only way to understand it is to see it.
• Can't filter lists by date created or date modified, particularly needed when tracking down a specific list or looking to remove older lists.
• Can't set up automated data dumps to an email address, has to be sent via API.

Incentivized

The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.

Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.

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

Sailthru provided a powerful, easy-to-use platform that was able to adjust to the needs we had at Dotdash. It was able to support the simple campaigns where we would send static creative to all recipients and the complex dynamic campaigns where we were customizing content. The scale and flexibility really made it a great platform for us to use.

Incentivized

• 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

• Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before.
• It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP.
• We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy.

Incentivized