TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Customer.io

Score9 out of 10

48 Reviews and Ratings

What is Customer.io?

Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to build sophisticated automated messaging campaigns. With access to real-time behavioral data, users can create personalized and relevant messages to engage and retain customers. This includes sending emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and more through a visual building experience. Built for scale, Customer.io boasts users among over 5,300 companies, sending over 17 billion messages per year.

Media

data-driven or manual segments that can be created in the no-code builder for recipient lists, campaign triggers, filters, and conversion goals.
the code editor for email, that helps navigate code and iterate.
account performance, visible at a glance from the Dashboard view.
drag and drop messages, time delays, and branches where desired, to build cross-channel campaigns.
triggered campaigns based on forms submissions, customer attributes, customer actions, and dates.
localization for global audiences. One message can be delivered in multiple languages.

1 / 6

My All-time Favorite Email Marketing Software.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for all things email marketing. If I’ve to list, these are the things I use CustomerIO for: - email marketing sequences - weekly newsletters - transactional emails - lead nurturing campaigns - audience segmentation and retargeting - tracking app activity and segmenting users - and others.

Pros

  • I really like its new feature where AI provides suggestions about the email.
  • New drag-and-drop email editor is much better compared to its traditional.
  • I really enjoy segmenting users. It really helps us with purchase and activity tracking.
  • Recommended send time feature is also a great addition.

Cons

  • I would love to see some more font options. I wanted to have the fonts that we use on our website for the email as well, but it doesn't have that option.
  • Integrating web forms can be a pain sometimes, but its also not a major drawback.
  • No evident suggestions as such, it's been good so far otherwise.

Return on Investment

  • Improved user retention, leads conversion, and overall user satisfaction.
  • Starting a weekly newsletter helped increase user satisfaction among our existing converted users.
  • We convert a great deal of leads through our lead nurturing campaigns.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

ConvertKit and Intuit Mailchimp

Other Software Used

Intuit Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Braze

simple or complex workflows - can handle it all.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Primarily, we were using Customer.io for 2 things:

1. Sending out newsletters

2. Set up auto trigger campaigns for onboarding sequences

Pros

  • Super easy and intuitive interface without overcomplicating anything
  • Metrics are super targeted without overwhelming the user
  • Very easy to set up one shot campaigns and long trigger sequences
  • Basic designing is quite easy
  • Ample of integrations available for analytics, event monitoring

Cons

  • Designing does have a lot more scope. Starting off is super easy, but lacks versatility.
  • Product metrics are rare and few. The tool has more marketing specific metrics, even though it as all the product data.
  • A/B testing could be more intuitive. Setting up experiments is possible, but analyzing results and iterating isn’t as smooth as it could be.
  • Pricing can creep up fast as usage grows. Not exactly a feature issue, but something you start noticing once you scale.

Return on Investment

  • Cheaper compared to the alternatives with a relatively generous startup program plan
  • Our onboarding led to a much better retention because of the onboarding sequence

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Klaviyo, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Twilio SendGrid

Other Software Used

Vercel, Deepgram, Temporal, Baseten, TickTick, Bitwarden, Cursor

Great tool for multiple teams

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CIO for connecting with our users through email, texts, in-app pop-ups, and even app rewards. We needed a central way for multiple members of the team to see our user-base and connect with them. Our entire app userbase in in CIO and we use it day to day to keep them updated, send webhooks to make sure they have the most up-to-date information, and to track their experiences.

Pros

  • API Broadcast to sent webhooks to segments of users
  • Assigning users to adaptable segments based of behaviors
  • Scheduling newsletters based off optimal times

Cons

  • The ability to search for specific journey names in user profiles or search for a user in a campaign
  • Newsletter editing is improved but still laggy at least in firefox
  • A way to save webhooks to easily be added to multiple campaigns

Return on Investment

  • It allows our support team to easily send account rewards to users quickly improving our CSAT
  • It allows us to target inactive users with newsletter and push notifications
  • Our user success team can create user outreach events quickly, allowing for A/B testing and last minute promotions without intervention from our engineering team

Usability

Other Software Used

Retool, Postman

My favorite ESP today

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Customer.io as our ESP and CRM platform, for batched emails as well as automated user journeys including emails, in-app messaging and push notifications. We pass all of our user attributes and events seamlessly via Segment. Customer.io powers all of our Lifecycle initiatives to convert registered to trial, trial to paid and subscriber retention.

Pros

  • Email building + showcasing metrics (human opens vs bot opens)
  • Multi-channel support, continuously improving and adding new channels.
  • Pricing is very fair for all the features that are given.

Cons

  • Customer.io needs to be more known! I don't know why they don't come up as a direct competitor to Iterable and Braze.
  • Their new Design Studio drag + drop tool could be improved with further customization.
  • Reports aren't the strongest - I use Amplitude to do all my Customer.io reporting.

Return on Investment

  • Increase in referrals shared via in-app messaging campaign.
  • Increases in key trial activities that contribute to paid conversion.
  • Encouraging users to take the "next best action"

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Iterable, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) and Klaviyo

Other Software Used

Amplitude Analytics, Twilio Segment, Snowflake

Great

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Email, Push notifications, sms, and managing all the communications with the client in one place.

Pros

  • Building automated workflow, really intuitive
  • Email design
  • Push notifications

Cons

  • In app messages can be better
  • Every time I duplicate a campaign, it does create a copy of the template. I would like to have the option to use a single template in multiple messages
  • Everything else is great

Return on Investment

  • It is hard to measure

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Twilio SendGrid

Other Software Used

Figma