Customer.io vs. Zoho SalesIQ

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

If you are facing issues of agents not being able to respond to queries, which is usually faced with our tools, Zoho SalesIQ is probably the best choice as the default notification is very loud and clear hence makes sure that no chat query is left unattended. The desktop application of Zoho SalesIQ for Windows, Linux, and MAC OS is a superb feature not offered by many other chat applications. The geographical locations of website visitors are sometimes not very accurate hence it is advised not to always rely on it and better reconfirm it from the lead.

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 has helped us increase our revenues by a significant margin over the last few years. Technical help is quite quick to respond.
• UI that is convenient and practical. It's simple to use and understand. We value being able to see how users arrive at our site.
• Zoho SalesIQ has a fantastic live chat feature that includes a notification, monitoring and reporting system.

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.

• Overall it's a very simple tool that doesn't offer a lot of complexity or expanded tools
• Even though it's all in the Zoho family, it doesn't work seemlessly with CRM or other Zoho products
• Not always the best at identifying similar users across different browsers, devices, etc

Incentivized

Everything was pretty intuitive to use if you've used an ESP before. The only thing that was confusing is Campaigns vs Newsletters - some of their naming conventions aren't straightforward. But their docs, support and AI agents are all super solid.

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

Tawk to was nice but it was missing a lot of features that Zoho SalesIQ has. And a massively important advantage that SalesIQ had was that it integrated with other Zoho apps that we already used. The pricing of Zoho SalesIQ was also very attractive, we felt that it offered a great bang for our buck.

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

• We interact with about 50 visitors a month and it's great when we can see the full picture, to see and interact based on whether they are a new contact or a long-time customer.
• Capturing new website visitors at the time that they have a question about your product is important.
• Missing chats can be frustrating.

Incentivized