TrustRadius Insights for Customer.io are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
User-Friendly Email Flow Creation: Many users have found the email flow creation feature to be very user-friendly, even for those without coding knowledge. They appreciate the ease of creating visually appealing newsletters with this feature.
Effortless Segmentation Capability: The segmentation capability of the product has been highly praised by multiple reviewers. It is effortless to segment users in multiple ways, allowing for better targeting in campaigns and improving overall campaign effectiveness.
Great Customer Support and Documentation: Customers have described the customer support and documentation provided by the company as great. They appreciate the assistance received through chat, calls, and screen sharing, indicating that the support team is willing to help extensively.
Customer.io is used as a core CRM platform in our business. The tool handles multi layered email, SMS, and other types of marketing channel campaigns for a variety of customer communications. Customer.io also has some advanced features that are used for measuring customer engagement with our campaigns and related analytics.
Pros
Organizing complex comms campaigns
Analytics of campaigns
Textured and detailed emails
Cons
Sales-specific features
Sales pipeline management
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Customer.io is really good if you are looking for primarily a platform to manage comms campaigns to customers. Customer.io is much more cost reasonable than some other big name platforms that have more features out of the box, but not all businesses need those features depending on their stage of development.
Customer.io tool is amazing for email marketing. It's very comprehensive, lets you go into a lot of detail, and is also user-friendly. I have used it to handle email marketing flows and newsletters for various clients. Since it's so complex, there's a bit of a learning curve. But after that, it's so easy to create flows that trigger at different times of the day/week or whenever a user performs a certain action. The editor is also much easier to use than some other email marketing tools I've tried.
Pros
Lets you create email flows without knowing code.
Easy to create nice looking newsletters.
Can easily segment users as many ways as you want.
Great customer support and documentation.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
We not only use Customer.io for all of our email and SMS communications, but we also use it as a database of sorts to segment our members. We send a monthly newsletter as well as about 50 different flows that are sent to our members based on their activity and involvement.
Pros
Customer Segmentation
Email Campaigns
Email Newsletters
A/B Testing
Cons
Sorting of Data
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are sending email campaigns or newsletters, I have yet to find a better solution. You can easily tie all of your systems into Customer.io, which makes segmenting your customers based on location, preferences, activity, or any data point you measure.
We are just starting to use SMS and it isn't using a native system but tying into Twilio, so I think you would be better off with a dedicated SMS platform if you are focusing heavily on that channel.
We use Customer.io at First (now part of RE/MAX) to manage all of our communications with customers—primarily email and push notifications, but also SMS messages.
Pros
Workflow building and management.
Extremely flexible and integrates easily with other services.
Solid email builder.
Webhook makes it easy to send and receive data in event-driven contexts.
Support for liquid makes highly detailed personalization possible in every message.
Cons
Push notifications are very rudimentary. Everything has to be done by hand unless you're sending an extremely simple message.
A bit too email centric.
Lacks an ability to schedule messages on a daily, weekly, etc. basis.
Likelihood to Recommend
Customer.io is great for teams that want to deliver highly personalized messages to the right people at the right time.
Customer.io is a great tool to get started with getting your marketing to the next level. It keeps the customer base up to date with API connections, and segmentation is made easy. So it's really easy to build flows/drip campaigns to specific groups (automated).
Training customers with this tool is also easy, people who are not tech savvy catch up quick. It's really easy to use and fun to build.
Pros
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.
Cons
Better visual automation builder, they are a little behind here.
Automate reports, I would love to see this.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you want to run a fast test campaign for let's say a new product, or collect data really fast and turn those in easy segments to communicate in a better way. Then go for it, it's so easy and fast to set up a customer communication stream, that it's also great for testing smaller campaign. Most of the time the hold back would be time + setup to do this. Not 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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a very small database of people, then probably the whole integration isn't justified. If you have a small business and don't plan to scale much, don't do it. It will be expensive for what you can get elsewhere (Mailchimp).
If you want a scalable and powerful platform, that will take some time to pay off, and you can wait, then do it. Once you get integrated and start sending events and attributes, the things you can do are almost limitless.
We use customer.io for B2C email marketing, specifically automatic and personalized triggers. It's use by marketing and sales primarily. It helps us communicate with customers and provide real-time and personalized information in a fast and automated way. For B2C companies, Customer.io is probably the best email product out there for high volume communication.
Pros
Automatic email triggers
Customization
Deliverability
Cons
HTML editor
Integrations
Mobile app
Likelihood to Recommend
Customer.io is great if you're a B2C company, or you have to send out lots of automated / triggered emails based on customer behavior. If you want more advanced automation workflows (e.g. B2B marketing) then you might want to look for a different product. Either way Customer.io is a great email tool.
We use Customer.io to automate all our email campaigns. I personally use it to trigger auto-messages for trial users signing up. It's all about urgency and timeliness when replying/messaging a new user and Customer.io allows me to do that hands free and automatic. The tool is addressing the problem of urgency and needing to be always available by allowing us to automate our email messaging.
Pros
Integrate with our existing tools
Trigger emails based on events
Automating our email drip campaigns
Time based/triggered emails for new users signing up
Cons
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.)
Likelihood to Recommend
A few specific scenarios where Customer.io is well suited would be attempting to scale your email campaigns, personalize and trigger emails based off of events from your system. Companies who use Segment and other third party tools would be well suited as Customer.io integrates super easy with other tools.
Where Customer.io is not as well suited would be an environment where each lead/customer requires a personalized email/attention. Customer.io is designed to help you scale, but if you are just writing one off emails you might like another tool.
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
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
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.
