Customer.io vs. LoopFuse (discontinued)

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.

My advice in choosing software in general is to know what you want to get out of the software. Then start researching the software on your own to see what features and benefits each has that will help you accomplish what you need. Once you have a good idea of what sorts of features you're looking for, reach out to the vendors that have them to see demos. Get really in-depth with your demos and ask for practical use-cases for each feature. Free trials are pretty useless with this sort of technology because the initial set-up is so time-consuming that you would either not set it up properly, or you would not stop using the provider you chose after the set up because you don't want to do it again!

• Ease of use, a good tool for non programmers, or not so tech savvy people.
• Great support, willing to help a lot, by chat, calls, or screen sharing.
• Fast updates, it's a newer tool, but they are coming with fixes and updates fast.

Incentivized

• It is easy to use without too much set-up.
• The e-mail engine is simple to use and straightforward, and e-mails seemed to get delivered for the most part.
• The reporting information is very in-depth and detailed.

• I may be missing it in the UI, but a place to see the list of emails who qualify for a certain email.
• One easy to view chart of all our automated/lifecycle emails to see what a given user would see over their customer journey. (This is really just a feature request/idea - the product itself is really awesome.)

Incentivized

• I think creating the HTML email campaigns could be made easier.
• I would like to have more HTML templates available.

My new company is much larger and we need robust capabilities so we're implementing Marketo currently.

It is really difficult to leverage all the neat features without a developer. I actually think the base software could be really great for a small business if the price is right, but there are so many things you *can* do but have to know how to do them or have access to your website and the ability to code.

Incentivized

It's pretty easy to use without any technical abilities, but the email editor will require html skills (no drag and drop).

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. . 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.

Incentivized

At the time we had to choose between several versions of marketing products. We decided to choose LoopFuse since a few of our employees were quite amused with the ease of use of LoopFuse. Also when looking at cost-effectiveness LoopFuse is a great product for the smaller companies. Making the decision was not too hard.

• 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

Incentivized

• The workflows were really easy to build and definitely increased our lead conversion. We did a lot of webinars, eBooks, etc - and it was so easy to decide on workflows to turn those prospects into hot leads by watching what they did on our website, or what they clicked on in our emails.
• Lead scoring also made our sales team more efficient. We had quite a few leads coming through our system, and many were not sales ready - but Loopfuse could transfer the lead score into Salesforce to show them which leads to focus on, as well as why the leads had the score they did (Loopfuse also imported lead activity into Salesforce - including emails sent, opened, clicked, webpages viewed, forms filled out, etc).