Customer.io vs. Sugar Market

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.

Salesfusion is a marketing automation platform more appropriate for small companies considering the limited functionalities are limited. The email builder tool is easy to use and ideal for someone with no coding knowledge

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

• It was easy to navigate.
• I liked that I could click on a link to email a potential client and that it would track/link that email back to the Salesfusion profile.
• I liked the reporting features so that I could see exactly how many cold calls resulted in appointments, with whom I last left voicemail or need to follow up with.

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

• The user interface is somewhat cumbersome and not intuitive at times.
• Additional user education available through downloads for existing customers rather than scheduled webinars would be helpful.
• Custom reporting is complicated to set up.

Incentivized

We've been very happy with SalesFusion since day 1. We've also created a new website during the time period that we've had SF and everything carried over great to our new website!

The support team has always been helpful, friendly, prompt and knowledgeable. They follow-up on all my tickets promptly and when needed are available for screen sharing to illustrate solutions for more complex problems. The support department at Salesfusion is one of my favorite things about the platform.

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 was using Net-Results and it seemed more geared for an experienced marketer who was familiar with HTML and didn't need as much training. I found the system frustrating and didn't have much success when I called in for training. I was brand new to automation marketing and needed more hand-holding than Net-Results was able to provide

• 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

• Increased employee efficiency
• Better customer service
• The ability to send email campaigns from a specific user and not "from" the organization title. We use this funcationality a lot and it was not available with other software so this is huge.