February 12, 2019
Scalability and automation for your emails
Pros and Cons
- 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.
- Data collection is a very weak part of Customer.io.
- You can't export data. You can't see it in any other way except the one they provide... definitely don't expect to rely only on their data because it's poor and can't be segmented.
- A/B testing could be better. You could use multivariate tests and you should be able to track which parts of the email you sent are most clicked, and so on.
- Onboarding isn't easy. Sending pageviews every time with the ID is very useful but not very easy to achieve, at least for a smaller company. Docs help but are extremely technical. I think it would be useful to have a friendlier or even an integration team for smaller/less technical teams.
- Integrating with other APIs for sending special content. For example, trying to send personalized emails to customers based on previous purchases isn't easy to achieve at all.
