Scalability and automation for your emails
February 13, 2019
Scalability and automation for your emails
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Customer.io
We are using Customer.io in the Marketing and Customer Experience departments.
For marketing, we are using it for two things: sending newsletters (massive) and triggered campaigns, that means, based on behavior or attributes of our users.
In the case of customer experience, we use them based on behavior. For example, if someone gives us an NPS of 10, we send them an email thanking and inviting them to share their testimony.
Basically, it solves our email issues with the scalability it provides based on their attributes and events engine.
For marketing, we are using it for two things: sending newsletters (massive) and triggered campaigns, that means, based on behavior or attributes of our users.
In the case of customer experience, we use them based on behavior. For example, if someone gives us an NPS of 10, we send them an email thanking and inviting them to share their testimony.
Basically, it solves our email issues with the scalability it provides based on their attributes and events engine.
- 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.
- 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.
We used Autopilot in the past. It worked well but the integration wasn't very good, considering they only used cookies. We have a very complex system right now to be able to track every customer, and it was expensive but worth it. Autopilot worked very well when we were starting, but then it didn't track purchases, it wasn't easy to change a customer attribute, and so on (this was a few years ago, probably they have improved a lot). It was more visual and better to create huge workflows.
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Mailchimp was the first program we used. It's very basic but good at what it does: sending a newsletter to your small database. It has integrated very well with other services and we haven't used in a lot of time, but certainly was grown a lot so it must be doing things fine.
I also tried Active Campaign but it was almost the same as Autopilot.
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Mailchimp was the first program we used. It's very basic but good at what it does: sending a newsletter to your small database. It has integrated very well with other services and we haven't used in a lot of time, but certainly was grown a lot so it must be doing things fine.
I also tried Active Campaign but it was almost the same as Autopilot.