Item: Customer.io
Rating: 8
Author: Sean Anderson

Overall Satisfaction with Customer.io

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Customer.io was used for our drip email campaigns. A drip email campaign is a bit more complicated than a regular newsletter campaign: drips are an automatic series of emails that go out, and can change based on different behaviors. We used Customer.io ever since they first launched and found their system the easiest and most feature-rich for this type of campaign.

We were able to send out dynamic series based on whether new clients were actively using certain features of our own software -- so we could send the right emails based on behaviors our clients or prospects took using our system. This made our engagements more useful, personalized, and effective.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Drip emails
Analytics and reporting
Integrations and API access

Cons

Reporting could be more customizable -- for example, seeing breakdowns of analytics by cohorts took a little bit of finagling

Return on Investment

Helped increase our new user engagement with our cloud-based software
Helped our sales team identify clients who had dropped off and stopped interacting with our software
Helped our sales and customer service team track which clients were completing their full registration process
Helped our marketing, sales, and customer service team identify key features and messaging with A/B testing for different campaigns

Alternatives Considered

SendGrid Marketing Email, MailChimp and Emma

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.

Other Software Used

Evernote, QuickBooks for Mac, Google Analytics, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, MySQL, AdWords, Facebook for Business, Twitter Ads

Likelihood to Recommend

Customer.io is perfect for drip email campaigns, meaning any scenario where you need to send a series of emails to a certain client. Ideal for engaging new prospects, maybe ones on a free trial for your own product, or for upselling clients based on their activity on your own site or their engagement with your own products. Also ideal for onboarding and tutorials/training emails.

It's perfect if you want your email series to change dynamically based on customer engagement: for example, let's say you get a new client and want them to complete 3 key steps to register with you. If they take Step 1, but not Step 2 and 3, you don't want to email them asking to do Step 1. So Customer.io would automatically skip your "Step 1 Email" and move on to Step 2 and 3.

It's also excellent for A/B testing, so you can optimize whatever you're using it for.

Customer.io Feature Ratings

Comments

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Customer.io is the (nearly) perfect drip email system