Customer.io Blog

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been guilty of sounding like a robot while writing a marketing email. Why do we do this? Well, reputation, for one thing. We don’t want ourselves (or our companies) to come across as too casual or flippant. Writing like a robot is safe and uncontroversial. …

Your hard work paid off. A customer made a purchase! happy dance Before you go get a celebratory treat, it’s worth your time to think about the next step in the lifecycle journey. Your customer is expecting a message to confirm her purchase, or what we call an order confirmation email. This type…

As an introvert, I’ll never get over the mind-boggling awesomeness that is online shopping. The mere fact that I can do all my research, compare prices, purchase my item, and have it delivered TO MY DOOR without having to step into a store or speak to anybody is just magical. One of the b…

There’s power in data. It helps your marketing team understand your customers. No more guesswork when you have actual evidence. But with the word data tossed around so casually, it can be confusing to grasp what everyone really means. That confusion leads to frustration, not knowing how to use da…

What winners look like. Team pink from the “Ami-zing race” at our last company get together. Deciding early on who you serve determines whether you’re a product-led company or a sales-led company. If you decide to take on big enterprise clients, a few of whom make up most of your revenue, …

To get Customer.io off the ground in May 2012, we raised $125k in small checks from friends and family plus two angel investors. At the time of that investment, our total capital raised was equivalent to two hundred and eight times (20,833% of) our current annual revenue run rate (ARR). Our s…

Every startup needs money to get started, whether it comes from outside the business or from the founders. But ideologically sticking to either bootstrapping or fundraising can be harmful to your business because of how they impact the way you use capital. Bootstrapping can prevent you fr…

There’s valuable feedback about your product and your business hidden beneath the surface. Above the water sits the easily visible feedback: metrics you’re collecting in analytics tools, NPS survey responses, customer complaints, angry Twitter rants—and hopefully a few vocal evangelists. Often, t…

The free trial is your product’s audition, the point of transition for people to move from an acquisition channel—content, paid advertising, word-of-mouth, etc.—to actual usage. This is the key timeframe to set people up for success. Don’t expect users to get excited for a product experience they…

Meditation, like any healthy habit, takes repetition to stick. But while the folks behind Calm, a meditation and mindfulness app, knew their product’s core value was helping people to learn and build a meditation practice—initially they didn’t put too much thought into the practice part of it al…