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Customer.io and Zapier Integration! (Finally)

Using Zapier here at Customer.io has helped our tools, and therefore, our teams, talk to each other in ways that help us be more productive. If you’ve ever cracked the nut on a big time saver, you know how good it feels — we couldn’t keep all those good feels to ourselves anymore. We’re excited to share our integration with Zapier with you!

BFFs

Being able to automate workflows and use cleaner data in smarter ways has done some amazing things for us — and now, it’s all available to you, too.

Before we share all the exciting use cases of this integration, let’s look back at the story of how it all came to be — and the valuable lessons we learned along the way.

A Brief History

The story of this integration began over two years ago. We created a basic Zapier integration that made all email activity available as a trigger — like when an email was delivered, opened, clicked through, etc. We were excited by the idea, because it allowed anyone using it to automate some pretty cool workflows across their various marketing stacks. We rolled it out to all our customers and moved onto our next big idea.

To set the stage, we send anywhere between 10 and 30 million emails a day on behalf of our customers. As a result, we were blasting Zapier’s service with multiple calls for nearly every email that went out and, understandably, we were asked politely to shut it down.

Womp womp.

We decided to put our little integration in time out until we had a more concrete plan for how to use it. Because #startuplife, over the next year or so, we focused on other priorities and kept the integration under wraps unless a customer asked for it specifically or technical support thought it would make sense to use.

Growing Pains

As we grew, the need for a Zapier and Customer.io integration became increasingly obvious to our own team.

We rely on several different apps for our daily marketing, sales, and people ops tasks: Slack, Livestorm, Clearbit, Close.io, FormKeep, Customer.io and more. Without a way to standardize the data generated by these apps, we were spending so much time flipping between tools, trying to consolidate information between them — which, quite frankly, was slowing us down.

Manual effort was one problem; another was duplicate effort. Because we’re a fairly small company, everyone at Customer.io wears multiple hats, and without a way to automate a lot of our activities we kept duplicating effort on certain tasks and neglecting others with no real way of knowing that that was happening. This wasn’t only a poor use of time, it was also mucking up CRMs and throwing off analytics.

Ultimately, we recognized that these were symptoms of a larger issue: We didn’t have the visibility we needed to scale. So about a year ago, we decided to start experimenting with our Zapier integration again.

Why We Love It

Customer.io Integrations – Zapbook – Zapier
With Customer.io you can send email, SMS, and push based on what people do or don’t do in your app.zapier.com

Our big-picture goal was to get our tools to communicate more effectively, so that we could actually leverage all the insights our tools were generating. So over the next year, we found new ways to automate the normalization of data — creating Zaps to do things like:

  • Randomly assign leads to sales reps
  • Standardize form entries for data analysis with formatter and webhooks
  • Create reminders and send notifications in Slack from new emails
  • Create a subscription preferences workflow

Learn more about how we did each of these.

These changes were pretty groundbreaking for us. Automating each of these workflows allowed us to scale without the need for a traditional marketing automation platform — which was a huge cost savings, but also allowed us to design a stack hyper-specific to our needs.

Mapping everything out helped us see where we had redundancies in effort, allowing us to delegate work and collaborate more effectively. Integrating tools we use weekly into tools we use everyday allowed us to improve responsiveness to leads, customers, and job candidates.

Together, all of these changes gave us the visibility we needed to scale. This is why we’re really geeking out about sharing this integration with you.

If you’re as pumped as we are and want to get started, check out these use cases and templates.

Let us know what you think — share questions, comments, thoughts, or gifs describing your experience using the Zaps on Twitter.