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One of the reasons people love Customer.io is that unlike typical mail providers, we archive the unique content of every email your business sends… forever.

We already had this content stored, so it wasn’t too hard for us to make it possible for the recipient to access it with a special token.

Adding “View this email online” to your emails.

View in browser works similar to unsubscribes in Customer.io. You can add a new link to your layout like:

<a href="{% view_in_browser_url %}">View this email online</a>

Viewing emails on your own domain

If you’ve set up a CNAME in your DNS to track links, your emails will get loaded with your domain in the URL:

CNAME

You set up your link tracking domain on the Deliverability page in your account.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Product Updates

Concierge onboarding doubled our conversion rate to paid in July

Concierge onboarding doubled conversions

… well, just about doubled. We’ve been running our concierge onboarding test for just under 400 observations (200 A and 200 B).

Here are the numbers for our concierge onboarding funnel

  • 192 emails sent
  • 21 replies (10.9% reply rate)
  • 14 “concierge calls” (7.2% call rate)
  • 8 conversions to paid (4.2% conversion rate)

We’re getting almost double the conversion rate to a paid account for people who have received the offer of concierge onboarding. I also didn’t look at people who didn’t do a call, but did convert.

So, 4.2% of the people who have received the offer have converted to a paid account. 2.2% of the people in the control group (did not received an offer for concierge onboarding) created a paid account.

Most people convert to a paid account over a long period of time. Our long term conversion to paid is in the range of 6% on average over the life of the company with variations from month to month. But in general more people will have converted after 60 and 90 days from signup.

Percentage of paying accounts by signup month

The test definitely isn’t over for us yet and longer term results for people who received concierge treatment will be interesting.

However, my working hypothesis is that at the very least:

Concierge onboarding shortens time to conversion

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed several conversions to paid accounts from people who have recently received concierge onboarding. My hypothesis is that the high-touch interaction allows you to do a few things:

  • Address any remaining objections to paying.
  • Increase trust in the product and your company.
  • Give people time-saving tips specific to their use of your product.

The most effective concierge onboarding sessions have been where:

  • The person sends over a few examples of emails they are trying to send in advance of the meeting.
  • People have integrated their data in to Customer.io.
  • We have a path forward, to-do items and reason to touch base again.

The least effective concierge onboarding sessions have been where:

  • The tool is clearly not a right fit (but I can usually recommend others)
  • People have just signed up, but not tried to use the tool (no data or emails attempted).
  • There are lots of people on the call who have no idea why they’re there.
  • The person just wants a sales demo.

Putting the offer for concierge 2 days after the account was created means in general people try to get started on their own first, but it isn’t so far in the distance that they’ve forgotten about the product. It feels great to help companies get started and in general those same companies are really grateful for the personal attention.

Have you tried concierge onboarding yet?

If you haven’t already — why not try emailing 5 people today to offer your help? Let us know how it works out in the comments!

User Onboarding

Update to viewing people

We released an update to how you view people in Customer.io.

Changing the name from Customers -> People

We renamed this section from “Customers -> Profiles” to “People”. I’ve never liked the term “Users” and we realize not everyone is a paying “Customer”, but everyone is a person. It’ll be up to you to define your groups like “Customers” and “App Users” in Customer.io.

Powerful searching by attribute

One of the improvements I think you’re all going to find extremely useful is search by “Attribute” and not just email address.

Search by attribute

So if you want to find everyone with the first_name “Colin” who also has a plan_price > $10, you no longer have to create a segment to do that. This makes on the fly querying much easier than in the past.

What’s great is that searching by attribute is fast whether you have 5 people or 5 million people in the system.

Viewing a person

Once you’ve found the person you’re looking for, there’s a redesigned overview page for you to get information about a them at a glance.
Old vs New

We’ve added activity to this view and we’re also now showing the most recent email sent. Each type of information about a user now has a more detailed view where we’ll be increasing the amount of depth we give you in to changes with every person in Customer.io.

The team is hard at work on some additional functionality in this area — like adding and editing people — but the framework we’ve built over the past 2 weeks is a great foundation for us to bring you a lot more value when you’re looking at people in Customer.io.

Check out the new profiles on the V3 Beta

P.S. A few people have written expressing uncertainty about being able switch back if they need to. You can go back and forth between the two versions of customer.io. You just log in to fly.customer.io for V3 or manage.customer.io for V2. Switch forward or back any time you like.

Product Updates

Curiosity makes you a better marketer

One of the most important traits to have as an email marketer (or as a marketer in general) is curiosity.

Curiosity leads you to ask questions like:

Other than running your own experiments, one way you can learn and get inspiration is by asking other people about their marketing (build an inner circle of people you talk to about this stuff).

For example, I’ve chatted with Brennan Dunn about playing “the long game” when it comes to a marketing strategy.

Brennan uses ad-retargeting with his product Planscope. Most people use ad-retargeting to try to encourage people to return and sign up for a product. However, Brennan was maybe a bit more curious than most. He thought: What if my retargeting ad sends people to sign up for an email course? An email course / autoresponder series is lower commitment than signing up for a product. Sending people to a course first also allows Brennan to teach people his philosophy for how he built Planscope and teaches them to become a better customer.

Other than ad-retargeting to a list, one strategy that so many B2B companies have found success with is the “Surprise personal email“. We certainly championed this email, but it was invented by some curious marketer who thought: “What if we automate an email that looks like it was written by someone on the team?”.

I’ve been asking a bunch of “what if?” questions recently and have started quite a few experiments. Most of the data isn’t ready yet, but I do have one experiment to share with you.

We wanted to do a homepage redesign but make sure we didn’t kill our conversion rate. The goal with the first pass is to match our previous rate, not beat it.

Old and new homepage

(old on the left, new on the right)

Assuming we didn’t destroy conversions, we would tweak and try other ideas to improve further.

Overall, the data suggests some positive things. 30% of people are viewing the features page vs 21% on the old homepage. There’s a slight increase in people viewing the pricing page too. Our conversion to signing up was essentially left unchanged. People are generally more knowledgeable about the product at the time they sign up.

Now I’d love to hear from you. What are the experiments you’re running or want to run?

Behavioral Messaging

What’s your conversion rate from trial to paid?

Conversion rate

Do you know how many of the people who start a free trial end up paying you real money?

Customer.io has improved from a bad conversion rate to a slightly less bad conversion rate. Here it is reported from our internal dashboard:

Conversion rate from free to paid

We currently convert at 3% from sign up to paid. For every 100 signups, we get about 3 paying customers.

(edit: I reported this wrong. Our conversion rate is actually 6 – 10%)

Your conversion rate might be higher, or it might be lower. Whatever your number is, it is likely your conversion rate will be vastly different to ours because your business is different.

Everything you do affects your free-to-paid conversion.

Converting people from free-to-paid is the sum-total of every decision you’ve made and everything you do in your business. Some decisions get more people in the top of the funnel but those people may not be high quality leads. Other decisions might send fewer people through your funnel but have a much higher success rate.

For example:

  • Do you have a trial period?
  • Do you require a credit card up front?
  • Are you acquiring signups through advertising?
  • Can people understand what your product does before signing up?
  • Do support questions get answered quickly?
  • How helpful are your on-boarding emails?
  • How quickly do pages in your product load?

Here are just a couple of the decisions Basecamp has made:

Basecamp Signup

Some unique things that affect conversion from free to paid for Customer.io are:

  • There’s a free tier with no time-pressure to pay.
  • We don’t do paid advertising — all signups are word of mouth or from reading blog posts like this.
  • Installing our javascript on your site can be challenging for non-technical folks.
  • Sign ups receive our lifecycle emails to help them get started.
  • Our entry level paid plan is $50 a month.
  • We try to make our documentation comprehensive
  • We have a features page and pricing to hopefully pre-qualify signups.

Knowing what to change and what to test can be a bit overwhelming. Should you drop your free tier? Or change your pricing, or have a 60-day trial like Basecamp does?

If you’re a SaaS business where the average customer has more than $2000 in lifetime value, it may be worth some time to try “Concierge Onboarding”.

Can Concierge on-boarding improve free to paid conversion?

For the past several months, I’ve been hearing people talking about “Concierge Onboarding”.

With concierge onboarding you spend time helping your prospective customers get up and running with your product. For Customer.io this might mean working with a company’s developers on implementation details, or working with marketing teams to design triggered email campaigns that map to their activation funnel.

If I had to put money on it, I’d guess that doing “Concierge On-boarding” might boost our conversion rate at least from 3 – 4%. At the high end it could even double our conversion rate.

I’ve designed an experiment where we can test this hypothesis.

Here’s what I’m doing. If you want to set up your own Concierge On-boarding experiment in Customer.io, you could use similar steps:

Step 1. Create a triggered campaign

My triggered campaign is simple.

Concierge Email Config

I’m sending an email to people who have signed up, 2 days after they sign up.

However, I want to ignore the people who sign up with free email accounts (like Gmail, Hotmail etc..). I don’t have enough time to offer Concierge Onboarding to everyone and in our experience, people who sign up with personal email accounts don’t convert as well.

I also want to track a “conversion” for my campaign. We want to track how many people end up as paying customers.

Step 2. Write your onboarding offer email

Offer of help

Feel free to steal my email copy. One temptation I had initially was to use software to streamline booking time in my schedule. Asking people to click on a link to book an appointment didn’t get as high a response rate as this more manual process. Since I actually want to talk to people, I decided to schedule more manually.

Step 3. Create an A/B test

If you want to see how offering concierge onboarding compares to not offering that service, you can create a 50/50 split a/b test.

AB Split Concierge

In an A/B test, a common thing to do is to test two different emails to see which copy does better.

However, rather than sending the variation, you can configure the email to send you a notification:

Who won't get an offer

That way you’ll be able to make a mental note of who didn’t get an offer. They are now in your control group.

Can concierge onboarding double our conversions?

In the past, the biggest indicator that a company was going to be successful in Customer.io and ultimately pay us is that they got started on their own and managed to send data and set up an email without talking to us.

Customer.io is a sophisticated product, and probably intimidating for most people. It’s not surprising that if you didn’t make it on your own you probably will abandon the product and not convert.

Will concierge onboarding double our conversion rate to paid from 3 – 6%? I really have no idea, but I’m going to be spending the next month or so working my butt off to help some people get up and running in the product. If it works, it should have a meaningful impact on our monthly recurring revenue. I’ll let you know either way.

Have you tried concierge onboarding? What changes have you made to your policies, pricing or product that have had a meaningful impact on your conversions from free to paid?

Share them in the comments below

User Onboarding

Next version of Customer.io in Public Beta

We released the next version of Customer.io (V3) in to public beta yesterday.

All existing and new accounts have access to this version at fly.customer.io.

Here’s a screenshot of the dashboard in the new app:

New dashboard

What’s different?

We renamed some features:

  • “Behavioral” and “Transactional” email are now combined under Triggered Campaigns. There are Event Triggered campaigns (the old transactional) and Segment Triggered campaigns (the old behavioral). There’s also now feature parity between these two types.
  • Newsletters were renamed Manual Emails. Newsletters are a use case for sending an email to many people all at once. The rename better reflects the broad ways people are actually using the feature.
  • Customer Profiles are now People. Customers was the wrong term when not everyone is paying you. People is a general term that may cover users, customers, leads, prospects or any way you want to think about the information you’re adding to customer.io.
  • Logs are now Activity Logs to differentiate from email logs.

What is new?

  • Email Logs
  • Drafts (all your unsent emails in one place)

What has improved?

This is a ground-up rewrite of both the API and application. This has enabled us to address some frustrations people have with the old app like making sure that:

  • Every page now has a unique link
  • You can click on links to open in a new tab / window
  • Pages load data faster and navigation is faster.

We’ve also bee able to make improvements to specific areas in the app:

What is not yet finished?

There are three areas in the app that are not currently finished:

  • Profiles
  • Segments
  • Settings

For each of these areas, we redirect you to the current version of Customer.io.

When will the old app be turned off?

Our plan is to run the two versions side-by-side until you’re happy and we’re happy with the new version to replace the old one. Our preliminary schedule is the following:

  • 2 weeks – Make Customer.io v3 the default
  • 6 weeks – v3 has every feature the current version has
  • 8 weeks – Current version of Customer.io is turned off

What’s next?

This version of Customer.io is the foundation for our product for the next 5 years. While we’ve been building v3, our ears have been open to your product feedback, but our hands have been tied.

I’m thrilled to be in a better position now to start building the product enhancements that you’ve all been asking for.

Product Updates

What we learned by abandoning the shackles of an office to become a remote company

Working Remotely

In December 2013, all full time employees at Customer.io were in the same office in New York City. Late last year we tried a 2 month experiment with remote working and had great results.

This gave us the confidence to decide at the end of 2013 to make it ok for people to be distributed. We made that decision public in our Annual Report and many people have been curious about how our experiment has been going.

5 months in to 2014, we’re now a distributed team.

Where our team is

Our team of 7 might be anywhere in the world. I’d never know and I have no idea whether or not they wear pants when they work.

It has been a tremendous experience to learn how to work together remotely, and how to hire remote people. We have some “gotchas” to share with you too.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned.

Remote companies make it easier to find great people

When we’ve posted on the job board WeWorkRemotely, we’ve received interest from extremely talented people. For example, when we posted for a Senior Front End Engineer, we received over 50 applicants. Of those applicants 3 – 5 were local to New York.

Having lots of quality candidates creates a different problem than what tech companies are used to. We end up turning away a lot of people who in other situations would probably get the job. We also attract people who want to leave their current job for personal reasons. People who no longer want to commute, or want to spend time with family, or want to travel and see the world all apply interested in the freedom working with us provides.

Remote companies need independent people

Internally, we have a doc now about hiring. Here’s a snippet from our checklist. We’re looking for somone who is:

  • A Maker & Fixer
  • Loves what they do
  • Has Empathy
  • Is a good communicator
  • Operates independently

Remote teams grant people a lot of independence. If people have the internal motivations to do great work, they’re more likely to be successful in a remote team.

Having remote management makes it (too) easy to not make decisions

After our team retreat in Barcelona at the end of March, I stayed for another week to spend time with John. Walking around the alleys in Barcelona, we realized that we hadn’t talked about the business since he started traveling in January.

There were business decisions and issues that were unresolved. We used to chat about them casually over lunch or when grabbing coffee from the kitchen.

Over that week we did a lot of talking and made some hard decisions together that impacted the business and the team.

The lesson there was that we needed to force ourselves to talk more. Since then, we’ve been having an open ended video chat on Saturday or Sunday where there’s a loose agenda and we talk about whatever’s on our mind. Casual discussions are the most valuable thing you can accidentally lose when becoming a remote team.

We’re also making sure that we meet up in person for a few days once a quarter.

With remote companies, asynchronous communication is key

I’d even argue that colocated companies should switch to asynchronous if they want people to be productive.

When we’re online, we hang out in Slack. In fact, we’ve been using Slack as an aggregator for conversations and system notifications:

Slack interface for remote chat

Here are a few things that happen in our Slack:

  • When a deploy goes out, a message is posted to the #deploys channel.
  • When we get a new support ticket, that goes in to #helpscout.
  • Off-topic or fun things get shared in the #random channel.

Slack gives us a handy way to see what’s happening across the business. My recommendation: Turn off pop up notifications.

We use Trello for engineering tasks, Quickcast lookback for short screencasts of things we’ve built / bugs, Hackpad Dropbox Paper for sharing ideas, and Draft for writing / proofing blog posts (like this one).

The goal with all of these is that the recipient can choose when to look at them. They don’t force people to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to you.

Remote companies make team interaction harder

The one synchronous communication we had was a daily standup at 11am Eastern time on Google Hangout. This was early (8am) for people on the US west coast, and could be quite late for John (depending on where he is).

As we added more people to the team, the daily standup became less useful.

If I didn’t prepare for standup, I would do a poor job of explaining what I was up to. Sometimes when other people were talking I found myself tuning them out if they rambled (sorry!).

Last week we decided to replace the daily standup with iDoneThis (asynchronous ftw) which makes it easy to fill in what you’ve done during the day and then shares it with the team at the beginning of the next day.

Beyond iDoneThis, it’s up to people working together how they want to work together. There won’t be a company-wide check in each day so it’ll be all text by default, unless people organize their own standup.

Without the standup, we would have no regular face to face (video chat) with the whole team. To address that we’re trying a weekly Google hangout on Friday. This is the first week and the goal of the hangout is conversation as a team without an agenda. Having a calendar event for “team socialization” seems forced. We’ll see how it goes. I’m optimistic and hope that it starts to feel natural and people look forward to it each week.

Remote companies should still meet in person

Even with all the great tools today, you can’t beat the richness of being in the same room with people.

We did one company retreat this year, and I’d like to have another one later in the year. Another strategy we’ve implemented is when we hire a new person, there’s an opportunity to meet people they’re working closely with in person. We recently brought Jon Q from Toronto to NYC to work with me, and Alvin from Boston to NYC to work with Henry.

Colin, Henry, and Alvin

The best part: Remote companies decouple work from life

We created a company that gives each person on the team the ability to choose where they live and how they work.

Making the company remote gave John, my cofounder the freedom to go and travel for a year while working. Making the company remote is giving me the freedom to leave New York and I’m excited to be moving to Portland, Oregon in a couple of months.

After making this huge change, would I ever want to move back to everyone in the same place? I don’t think so.

If you’ve got a remote company, what advice do you have for us as we grow? If you’re thinking about joining a remote company or starting one, what questions do you have for us?

Curious about what this remote team of ours does? We make Customer.io, a platform for sending targeted messages based on what people do or don’t do.

Company News

Campaign Filtering

Holy email campaigns, Batman! Customer.io just released really fast campaign filtering.

Finding your campaigns gets a bit easier in V3. now showing 20 per page AND you can type in the name of a campaign to quickly filter, or sort by things like the number of emails sent, when it was created or when it was last edited.

Fast Filtering

You may also notice that we’ve now combined “Behavioral” and “Transactional” in to “Triggered”. Behavioral is now “Segment Triggered” and Transactional is “Event Triggered”. This change gets to the heart of how these two types of email actually get sent — by sending an event or by people matching segments.

Product Updates

Personalized emails will make your customers even happier

Customer.io email campaign customer personalization

Have you ever walked into your favorite store or restaurant and a member of the staff immediately recognized you? Imagine they said something like “Hey Sofia, we just got in a great hat that will go with the coat you bought last month!”

It would be a pretty surprising feeling, right?

We’re used to wandering anonymously through the world. However, if we’re offered useful information based on our likes… well that would be pretty handy.

It’s possible to provide this kind of personalized experience with email marketing. You’ll need to plan ahead and collect some information first, but then away you go.

If the idea of including a personal touch in your emails isn’t enough to make you want to start, take a look at a recent study from Experian. They found that personalized emails had 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher click rates than emails without any personalization.

Sending a highly targeted, well-personalized email can increase your opens and clicks, drive conversion rates higher, and deliver some serious value to your users.

What’s not to like?

How to use data to personalize your emails

Okay, so you’re sold. You want to start modifying your email content based on your user’s wants and needs. How do you get started?

Collect Data

The first thing you want to do is make sure you’re collecting user attributes and/or user actions. This could mean something as simple as adding a “Name” field when people sign up (or in a profile screen). Here are some other things you could ask for:

  • Name (first and last)
  • Location
  • Birthday
  • Favorite Color (or animal, or any favorite)
  • Interests (products, areas you email about, etc)

Alternatively, you can go a little deeper and store any applicable data you’re collecting. This could be something like what your user last purchased or what they’ve searched for.

If you want to know how to collect that data in Customer.io check out our integration information.

Use personalized information to benefit users

Before you go hog wild with personalization, you’ll want to consider what details you’re going to include in your emails. There is a fine line between helpful and creepy when it comes to personalized emails, and you don’t want to step over that line.

Adding a user’s name is generally a safe first step (more on that later). However, customizing everything based on what a user just searched for could quickly set you on the path to becoming Big Brother.

Take Amazon for example. Amazon is well known for their awesome email personalization but even they have crossed the creepy line and regretted it. If a giant like Amazon can take personalization a step too far, it’s a good warning to think carefully about your user’s privacy.

What benefit does your personalization offer users? If you’re throwing in personalization just because you can, that’s not good enough. Give your users something valuable based on their past purchases or preferences.

Think about your specific content as it relates to your product. If you sell something users could be sensitive about, adding information about past purchases or searches could be inappropriate or off-putting. If you’re selling T-shirts, you’re probably safe.

Think about our fictional Sofia above. The store staff remembered her name and her last purchase, and then they used that to point her to coordinating products. The “wow” moment wasn’t so much because of the personalization, it was how useful the suggestion was.

Ultimately, how you personalize your emails will depend on what information you collect and how you can use it to benefit your users.

Check your data to use a name correctly and powerfully

The first step most companies take is including a user’s name in their email, but even then you want to be careful. The research on using names in emails is a bit mixed: Experian’s research showed a 26% boost in open rates when the subject line was personalized with the user’s first name, but [research done] (http://www.fox.temple.edu/posts/2012/06/dear-insert-company-name-personalized-emails-dont-impress-customers/) by Temple University shows the opposite, with users being less likely to respond when their name is used.

Why the conflict? A name done right is powerful, but so often they go wrong (old names, incomplete names, misspelled names, etc).

When you’re personalizing with names, you want to be very careful about the data you’re collecting. You might want to manually skim through your recent user additions to make sure nothing looks off. If someone added NO!zzzzhha as their name, you might want to just delete it rather than risk sending an email with “Hi NO!zzzzhha!” Spending a little bit of time to make sure your data is clean can pay off big in the long run.

In addition, we recommend adding logic whenever you can, to make sure details make sense and look truly personal–not automated. One tip, if you have a mix of capitalized names and ones that aren’t is to force capitalization.

For example, in Customer.io you can automatically capitalize names by adding a “| capitalize” filter to your Liquid ({{ customer.first_name}} would become {{ customer.first_name | capitalize }}). Sending an email that starts with “Hi Ruxin,” looks much more professional than “Hi ruxin,”.

If you’re not using Customer.io to send your emails, check with your email provider and see if they have any tricks for standardizing your data before you add personalization.

If you’re in doubt about the validity of any of your data, just skip it. It’s better to be impersonal than blatantly incorrect.

Personalize with related content to engage users

Once you’ve dipped a toe in the personalization waters, there are many ways to get more advanced. Consider including information about what a user recently searched for or updates to items on their wish list.

What if you had just sold someone a killer new T-shirt? Consider sending them an email pointing out accessories or other clothing items that would coordinate with their new tee.

Personalizing with related items can have a big payoff. A study from Temple University found that when customers are directed to products that their past purchases suggest they’d like, it triggered positive feelings in 98 percent of customers. Positive feelings equal more sales. Who doesn’t like that?

Not ready to take that large of a leap? How about starting with something smaller? Let’s say you’re handling communications for a children’s sports league. Every email you send is letting the children and their parents know when games are scheduled or specific steps that the parents need to take before their child can play.

Generic Sports League

While you can send everyone the same generic email above, what if instead you only showed information relevant to them? You could tell them when their games are scheduled or let them know about registration steps they still need to complete.

Personalized Sports League

Personalized design adds a fun, unique touch to your emails

Don’t just think about personalization when it comes to your content, consider personalizing your design as well. Remember the suggestion of asking a “favorite color” above? You could have some fun with that and incorporate a user’s favorite color in the emails you send them. Changing your email’s color based on a user’s like might tip away from being a direct benefit for the user, but it’s still a fun touch.

Or take our sports league example from above. The standard blue header could be changed to be the team’s colors, all with a little bit of personalization in your email.

The Bears!

If you’re using Customer.io, you can add some if/else tags to your layout. For example:

{% if customer.team == 'Bears' %}
<img src="http://www.mydomain.com/teams/bears_header.png">
{% elsif customer.team == 'Giraffes' %}
<img src="http://www.mydomain.com/teams/giraffe_header.png">
{% else %}
<img src="http://www.mydomain.com/teams/default_header.png">
{% endif %}

Don’t forget to test along the way

Not to put a damper on the personalization party, but before leaping into the deep end, we recommend taking small steps and testing as you go. Adding varying types of personalization is a great thing to A/B test.

Choose something simple and see how your users respond. Maybe your users will fall into the group who happily opens emails when their name is included rather than the group who finds it off-putting. You won’t know until you try it out.

Personalization sparks positive feelings in your users. Positive feelings make them more likely to stick around and think about your company favorably. Personalization can also drive more purchases and conversions, because you’re using it to send relevant content to the right person at the right time. It’s a bit of work to get started, but the payoff is worth it!

Try it out, see how your users respond.

Are you doing anything great with personalization that you want to brag about? Hung up on the right tactic to use or how to collect user data? Have you seen any really awesome T-shirt designs recently? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Happy Emailing!

P.S. Want to start personalizing your Customer.io emails? We have a help doc explaining how to personalize your emails with Liquid.

Behavioral Messaging

A/B test your transactional email

One thing you’ll notice in V3 of Customer.io is we killed the name “Transactional campaigns”.

What we used to call Transactional email in Customer.io was an email triggered by an event. So, in V3, we’re simplifying and getting to the heart of what you’re doing. We’re renaming Transactional campaigns -> Event Triggered Campaigns.

We’ve consolidated Behavioral and Transactional in to Triggered Emails and have a unified UI. That has made it possible to share some features with Event Triggered email that were only available to “Behavioral” email before.

  1. You can now delay an event triggered email
  2. You can send multiple emails from one event
  3. You can now A/B test your event triggered emails.

Delay your event triggered email

A common request we received was to delay a transactional email by 10 minutes or so. Delaying emails was available in Segment Triggered (Behavioral Email) and is now available for Event Triggered emails.

Setting a delay

Send multiple emails from a single event

Add as many emails as you like. You could even spread them a minute apart like the example below (though that might annoy people!)

Multiple emails

To make each email unique, any event data that you sent is available for every email.

A/B test your event triggered emails

Want to see which “friend request” email gets the most people to accept? Now you can run an A/B test in an Event Triggered (transactional) email.

AB test UI

You’ll now be able to test subject lines, content and timing for your event triggered emails too.

There’s a lot more power in V3 of Event Triggered emails and by reducing complexity, it’s easier for us to improve even further.

Have a look around Customer.io V3, but we don’t recommend making changes just yet:
Fly.customer.io

Product Updates