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Wedio

How Wedio Uses Customer.io to Capture 26% of Their Total Revenue and Grow Their Marketplace

Written by Lucy Wen on .

Wedio is an online marketplace connecting creators, filmmakers, and photographers with other people who want to lend and borrow equipment. Within their marketplace, they enable three types of members: Renters, Lenders, and Subscribers.

Customer.io: No Negatives

When Wedio set out to find a marketing messaging platform to replace Klaviyo, they were headstrong about one piece of criteria: data ownership. From the beginning, they knew how important it was to find a provider that would let them completely own their own data, while also transforming that data to perform any action and campaign they could imagine.

“We know how important data is. Not only that, but to own your own data. That’s why we chose Customer.io.”

–Daniel Sand, CEO

Adjacent to their need for data ownership was their need to be able to segment their data. With thousands of Lenders, Renters, and Subscribers, their need to be able to granularly segment was a top priority. 

Transactional message capabilities were also a huge part of their selection process. Since the Lender, Renter, and Wedio has to be notified for every action and change status, the ability to send thousands of transactional messages simultaneously was mission-critical. 

Their last checklist item for selecting a new messaging platform was that it’s technical enough to power complex campaigns but simple enough for their content marketer to use.

Seeing the Whole Picture With Lifecycle Marketing 

Wedio uses Customer.io for every step of their lifecycle marketing strategy, starting from the second a user becomes an identifiable lead. They capture leads through an extensive ecosystem ranging from gated content, free templates, discount codes, guides, and gamification. All of which stem from organic traffic from their website.

Once leads are captured, they go down one of three intricately designed funnels within Customer.io. Through actions that leads take either by interacting with their messages or through their website (via a Javascript snippet), Wedio uses these clues to determine if they’re interested in being a Renter, Lender, or Subscriber.

For example, Wedio knows when a user has downloaded their pricing calculator to see how much it would cost to own a specific product and how long that would take with a fixed monthly fee. Through this, they’re able to know that this person is considering becoming a Subscriber. They also know which piece of equipment they’re interested in so they can start sending personalized content. 39% of people who download their calculator start a subscription with Wedio, which contributes to 26% of their total revenue!

Once a user enters either the Renter, Lender, or Subscriber journey, Wedio embarks their leads on a 6-month journey encouraging them to continuously take the next step, whatever that might be at the time. For example, when a user is in the Lender journey, Wedio encourages them to create a listing by showing related content, tips on getting started, and the option to book a call with a member who could help them with their first listing.

Through the Lens of Efficiency to Record Higher Conversions 

As part of their efforts to keep their marketplace a reliable place for their customers, Wedio goes to great pains to verify both the lender and the renter. Photo and film equipment is valuable so the stakes are high for lenders and renters. They began constructing a process to verify that users are who they say they are, and, based on their digital footprint, whether or not they are likely to have good intentions. 

A big challenge was the amount of time it took to verify a user. Before implementing Customer.io, the average time it took to verify a user was 2.5 hours. This became a point of friction as, they discovered, filmmakers often don’t book their equipment until the night before a shoot. This made time of the essence, and when users didn’t get verified fast enough, they’d go to their competitors or find other avenues to secure their equipment.

To fix this, Wedio created a workflow in Customer.io to complete the verification faster. Whenever a verification request came through, Customer.io would fire a text and a Slack message to the team member on call, telling them to drop everything to check the verification. With this real-time notification, they were able to cut down their verification time to 30 minutes! This in turn increased their completion rate from request to rental from 64% pre-Slack integration, to 84% completion rate after this integration. This has proportionally increased their revenue from rentals by 31%.

The Right Focus: The Only Competition is Yourself

Among other emails that Wedio sends to lenders through Customer.io, one is a monthly recap email that acts as their personal dashboard. This seemingly fun and informative newsletter actually has some pretty smart strategies behind it. In this summary email, Lenders see their earnings from the past month, the viewer count on their listings, how many rejections they received, their average response time, and benchmark of their data against themselves and others. 

By telling their Lenders, for example, ‘your average response time is 60 minutes, 30 minutes more than average response time of other lenders’, they hope to inspire Lenders to do better and outperform themselves. When Wedio can get their customers and users to be more active, it only increases participation and stickiness across the entire marketplace, a win for Wedio. This retention tactic yields them a 62.9% open rate on emails with a 4.8% click-through rate on content aimed to help the lender improve their profile and lend more. 

Final Thoughts

Through Customer.io, Wedio has seen their marketplace explode with activity. By enabling lifecycle journey campaigns for all members of their ecosystem starting from lead generation to retention, Wedio has accelerated their rate of growth to the point that in the first two weeks of May 2022, they gained the same number of new members that it had previously taken them a year and to gain. Well done, Wedio! 

Mysa

How Mysa Revved up their Revenue by 592% Through Email Marketing

Written by Lucy Wen on .

Mysa makes smart high-voltage thermostats that allow their US and Canadian customers to have full control over the heating and cooling of their home all within the Mysa app. Their thermostats can be purchased online through their website. 

Mysa was previously using Klaviyo to send their marketing messages but decided to switch to Customer.io for our ability to segment audiences more granularly and incorporate customers’ product usage into their messaging strategy.

By using Customer.io to create a more targeted email strategy, Mysa has seen its revenue skyrocket over 592% from just their email marketing.

The Road to Purchase

Purchasing a smart thermostat is more complex than the average eCommerce product because it needs to be compatible with the voltage and setup of a customer’s household. To ensure customers are suited to purchase their thermostat, Mysa embeds a Typeform compatibility quiz on their website. Results from the quiz determine if the thermostat is suitable for their household.

For the people who complete the compatibility quiz and are deemed qualified, Mysa asks if they’d like to opt-in to their newsletter. Once opted-in to these newsletters, they see that 19.2% of leads end up purchasing a thermostat. A huge conversion!

Suppose a lead is unsure whether they can take their old thermostat off the wall and replace it with a Mysa thermostat (a common drop-off point on their form). In that case, Mysa asks them if they’d like additional information regarding uninstalling their current thermostat. This allows them to capture leads who might have otherwise fallen off and convert them to customers. Through this flow, they see a 10.8% conversion rate for leads who initially marked themselves as unsure if their household was compatible.

Smart Thermostat, Smarter Automation

Mysa uses events taken by both their leads and customers to understand the actions and messages they should send to them. 

One example is how they trigger abandoned cart sequences with their Shopify integration (via Zapier). Using JSON in the builder, they dynamically include the picture, description, and any accompanying discounts directly in the email copy to send to leads who added a product to their cart but didn’t check out. With tens of thousands of abandoned cart emails sent, their 2.2% conversion rate yields them sizeable revenue that would otherwise have been lost. 

Another automation they’re able to incorporate into their strategy is by triggering an onboarding campaign when a customer has paired their mobile app to the smart thermostat. When Customer.io detects this, Mysa knows that that’s the cue to start sending a series of onboarding emails to help the customer get the most out of their product and know what to do now that they’re connected. 

In addition to this onboarding activation flow, they also set up messages to send out an NPS survey 30 days after a customer has paired a thermostat to their app. They’ve even gone a step further to delight their customers by making this point of entry simple. They build their email to appear as though a customer can vote directly in the email. Based on the numeric score they vote on within the email, they are brought to a specific Typeform survey already associated with that score to prevent customers from having to input the information twice. 

Data Housekeeping: The Energy-Efficient Way

Mysa also uses Customer.io as their primary CRM tool and as their single source of truth to base lead and customer communication on. From the continuous stream of actions and non-actions taken by leads and customers, they set up automations in their campaigns that keep their audience data clean. Beyond just campaign-related events, when events happen in the backend of their app, that information also updates a user’s profile within Customer.io. For example, if a customer adds the number of Mysa units on their account to their app, it updates their Customer.io profile in real-time so that they can create segments on it later.

“Customer.io is our main source of truth for anything related to marketing or eCommerce details. We take actions taken by leads and customers on our website, app, and Shopify, and funnel it into Customer.io instead of manually updating anything.” 
– Performance Marketing Manager, Mysa

They also use information stored in Customer.io to help make informed business decisions. Through an automation that captures the moment a lead becomes a customer, Mysa is able to uncover how long it typically takes for a lead to convert to a customer. This has helped in their lead acquisition strategy by knowing how long they should reach out to leads before their efforts become futile. 

In a similar vein, they used to run contests where leads could win various freebies. Mysa then studied the results of the contest to see which of these leads eventually became customers. Through the data, they learned that this strategy wasn’t yielding significant results, so they stopped running this contest to focus on other approaches.

“Through data analysis within Customer.io, we’re able to learn about our lead acquisition strategy and understand whether it’s worth it to focus on a specific group or tactic, and if it is worth our time and money.”
– Performance Marketing Manager, Mysa

Black Friday

Like many other US and Canadian-based eCommerce companies, Black Friday is an important day at Mysa. To run their Black Friday deals, they’ve set up amazing configurations within Customer.io to ensure the right offers get to the right leads. 

As one of Mysa’s Black Friday promotions, they partner with specific utility providers to offer rebates to customers. To do this, they use Customer.io to segment and target leads who live in the locations supported by those utility providers. They then take their sophistication one step further by segmenting out users who have used a rebate in the past, and acknowledge that in their messaging. Compared to their regular Black Friday promotion that targets users on a more general level, they see a 3x higher conversion rate, which they attribute to the personalization based on localization.

Final Thoughts

Through the use of sophisticated configurations led by smart automations, Mysa has been able to push their messaging personalization strategy to the highest degree to increase sales and revenue. By transforming every user attribute along with actions taken by leads and customers, Mysa sculpts the best messages to increase sales.

Locking Users into Segments to Unlock 20% of Monthly Upgrades

Written by Lucy Wen on .

Guardio is a cyber security company that provides protection to users through a browser extension. Driven by the ideal that security software should be easy enough for our everyone to use, they develop creative tools and products to combat modern web and browser threats. Guardio offers a freemium model along with a paid subscription-based browser extension that protects over 1M users from malvertising, phishing, scams, malicious extensions, and other web-based threats.

Guardio’s journey to Customer.io started when their marketing team decided to focus more on the end-user experience and their customer lifecycle journey. Previously, they had grown frustrated with the limitations of using react for their emails and how heavily they had to rely on developers to create, test, and send their emails. It became hard to manage their customer experience when it came to knowing who was getting what messages and when. Additionally, with their flagship product being a Chrome Extension, context-aware in-app messages were an important channel Guardio wanted to incorporate by implementing with Customer.io.

The Challenge Needing to create a more harmonious customer experience journey where members of the Guardio team could easily see & control the lifecycle journey

The Fix Customer lifecycle-based segments

The Result Over 20% of all monthly upgrades came directly from a Customer.io campaign

Securing their Customer’s Accounts to Secure Upgrades

Guardio uses Customer.io to send <10 million messages a month to < 3.5 million devices across their 1 million users. With Customer.io webhooks and analysis from our metrics dashboard, they’ve learned from their own customers when they’d prefer to hear from Guardio and have perfected their timing for the best results. In this message, they informed the user that they had blocked a security threat and suggested they explore their premium product to unlock even more potential. They’ve seen that 20% of all their direct monthly upgrades come from a Customer.io campaign. These upgrades also account for 20% of their total revenue.

“We send every single thing that happens in our product to Customer.io and have found a way to send relevant messages based on something that the user experiences and not just random broadcasts.”

–Sharon Blatt Cohen, Senior Marketing Lead

Guardio also harnesses the power of Customer.io’s segmentation to target their premium users who experience a lot of cyberattacks (which Guardio blocks) to ask their customers to leave honest reviews to attract more customers.

Remote Control Viewing for Lifecycle Management

One of the most important factors that pushed Guardio away from their previous provider and to Customer.io’s platform was the ability to create sprawling campaigns based on where the customer was in their lifecycle journey. 

In the past, they had worked with siloed campaigns, and it was difficult to control message frequencies when a single user would be a part of two or more campaigns at once. 

Their 10 major lifecycle campaigns, which cover every part of a customer’s journey include the following:

Each campaign has one ultimate action they’d like the user to perform. For example, the segment titled ‘Installed’ encompasses users who have installed the product. Their end goal for users in this campaign is for them to complete their first malware scan. Once a user has completed the scan, they graduate into the “Upgrade” campaign which, as its name suggests, aims to upgrade users.

By running users through different campaigns meant for each stage in the lifecycle journey in a controlled way, they have been able to tighten up their communication strategy. With some of these campaigns spanning 3 months, Guardio can guarantee the flow and timing in which their users hear from them. They even implement logic regarding iteration counters that make sure if a user re-enters the same campaign, they receive content variations. 

Through these campaigns, Guardio now has a clear view-from-above of where people are in the customer journey, what messages they’re receiving and when, and where they stand in regards to conversion goals and outcomes. 

A Super-User of Event Triggers and Liquid Tags

To say that Guardio is a super-user when it comes to event triggers and attribute values would be a humble description. Guardio actively uses 400 event triggers across all their lifecycle journey campaigns with countless unique user attributes . By turning event actions into attributes, they’ve been able to supercharge their messaging personalization.

A prime example of this is when a user cancels. First, Guardio asks them why they’re canceling. Depending on the reason, they use Liquid tags to personalize which funnel of their reactivation campaign they will flow through. If someone says they canceled because the service was too expensive, their reactivation messaging focuses on discounts. If the user said they canceled because they couldn’t get the hang of how to use the product, their reactivation campaign content focuses on helping them understand how to use the product. 

Final Thoughts

By creating campaigns that utilize event triggers, segmentation, attributes, and liquid tags based on where customers are in their lifecycle journey, Guardio sends hyper-personalized messages to their audience to inspire them to take actions such as completing a security scan, upgrading, or leaving honest reviews. Even our own team was impressed by the extent of personalization they’ve managed to execute by leveraging events and attributes. 

Spotahome

How Spotahome became 5x more efficient with Customer.io

Written by Lucy Wen on .

Spotahome is an online platform where people can book short-term and long-term home rentals. Working in 28 countries across Europe, they meet renters in the digital age by enabling every step of the process to be done 100% online. They offer in-person verifications on properties to ensure that each listing is up to their standard and provide a secure checkout experience for their tenants.

Spotahome doesn’t just use Customer.io to send messages in their customer lifecycle journey. Their primary business goal, which they use Customer.io for, is to increase engagement on both the landlord and tenant side to increase revenue. With Customer.io, they have seen that about 50% of all their bookings (and therefore revenue) happen after a customer has opened an email from them. Through Customer.io, Spotahome is able to run tests on their processes to improve operational efficiency.

Engineering Team, We’re Breaking Up With You

One of the biggest goals Spotahome wanted to accomplish by moving to Customer.io was to decouple the engineering team from the marketing team, while also enabling other departments to generate value. Previously, every change had to go through the engineering team because everything was hardcoded. They wanted to give marketers the freedom to change things without the assistance of an engineer. By gaining autonomy with campaign creation in Customer.io, they knew other teams would also be able to self-service themselves when they needed to communicate with the end-user. 

And that’s exactly what happened when they moved all their communication to Customer.io. Now, they have 20% of their entire organization actively using Customer.io, spanning marketers, product managers, engineers, designers, and their operations team. With so many teams empowered with the ability to create complex campaigns with webhooks without having technical knowledge, they have seen business operations improve immensely. 

“One of the biggest successes I’ve seen with Customer.io is being able to have multiple teams use the platform to generate value. Because the UI is so intuitive, anyone can go in and start building complex campaigns.”

–Jorge Alonso, Marketing Manager

So…How is Having More Cooks in the Kitchen Beneficial?

An operational challenge Spotahome used to have was not knowing whether a property was still available to rent or not. Because landlords could have rented out their properties on other platforms without notifying Spotahome, this posed a huge challenge when trying to keep accurate and up-to-date listings on their platform. 

Armed with a mixture of time-based and event-based triggers, Spotahome’s operations team was able to deploy campaigns to solve this problem. One of these campaigns entails sending landlords an email 45 days before their property is set to become available. In the campaign, they ask landlords to validate that their property will still be available with just a click of a button. For properties that are already listed on their site as ‘currently available’, they send a similar campaign to landlords who have not refreshed their listing in the past 7 days to make sure it’s still available. This effort has been an easy and low-effort way for landlords to stay engaged with Spotahome while keeping inventory hygiene clean.

To Automate or not to Automate?

Another innovative way Spotahome uses Customer.io is to determine the best strategies for automated communication via our A/B testing functionality.

Spotahome’s general approach has always been to lean on personalized and human touches to deliver the best customer experiences. Much of their communication during a tenant’s booking process was personally done by one of their Customer Experience Agents.

Spotahome started to wonder whether certain touchpoints along the checkout funnel could be more automated, or if they really needed a Customer Experience Agent to drive the highest conversions. They began testing this hypothesis in Customer.io by creating one path where a customer received automated messages and one where the Customer Experience Agent reached out personally. After spending some time funneling users down both paths at random, they found no significant difference in conversion between customers who received the automated messages versus customers who received a personalized touch. 

Because there was no significant difference, Spotahome keeps that touchpoint as an automated message to save time and resources of their valuable agents. 

The impact of this test has been a huge win for efficiency. By freeing up their agent’s time, each agent is now able to manage 5x more bookings than before without sacrificing conversion!

Verifying Properties

In addition to testing best messaging automation practices, they’ve also enabled automation byways of webhooks and event triggers to streamline the way they verify properties.

Recently, Spotahome had decided to let their tenants request which properties they want to be verified. Since Spotahome has tens of thousands of properties listed, it made sense for the tenants tell them which properties they wanted to be verified first instead of Spotahome making the guess.

At first, the process went something like this: users would request verification of a property, and a Spotahome associate would manually reach out to the landlord to start the verification process.

Now, thanks to Customer.io’s webhook actions, Spotahome can cut out the middle (hu)man. When a tenant requests to verify a property, Customer.io uses that event as a trigger to enter the landlord into a campaign to arrange for the verification of the property. This webhook and campaign logic allows renters and landlords to interact with one another in a controlled environment, increasing efficiency and moving things along faster.

Results

Through these learnings and changes, Spotahome has seen their customer retention rate increase from 5% to 7%- a 40% incremental increase! These retention and engagement practices have contributed to 15-20% of Spotahome’s revenue, which has all been made possible by Customer.io’s ability to enable testing and enforce operational efficiency with messaging practices.

Olivia Image

How Olivia Doubled their Onboarding Activation Rate

Written by Lucy Wen on .

Olivia helps people spend smart and save more. Powered by AI, this financial advisor app analyzes their customers’ spending habits and delivers personalized recommendations on how to live well for less.

The Challenge Operating on a marketing messaging platform with less-than-ideal testing capabilities, workspace configurations, reporting, and customer service.

The Fix A platform and partner with cohort testing capabilities, flexible segmentation, accurate real-time reporting, and a Customer Success team who proactively collaborates to drive results.

The Result 2x increase in customer onboarding activation, 2 full days won back per month due to efficiency, and a treasure trove of features and analytics that drive optimization.

Outgrowing A Limiting Email Provider

With a rapidly growing customer base, Olivia needed a more feature-rich messaging provider who would also partner with them. Their existing provider, Mailchimp, just couldn’t keep up with their evolving needs.

That’s when Marketing Manager, Heloisa Assis, went on the hunt for a solution that would enable Olivia’s small-but-mighty team to consolidate their separate systems and work more efficiently together. She had used Braze at a previous company, but ultimately decided to go with Customer.io for our ability to not only scale with their growth, but for how cost-effective our solution was for a growing business.

Backing up Theories with Cohort Testing

Getting customers to connect their bank account after signing up is Olivia’s primary activation step. While on their previous messaging provider, they had a hunch that they could increase their activation rate by sending reminders to connect their bank accounts one day after signing up, instead of 3 days after. Without having the ability to test timing differences in Mailchimp, their hands were tied. 

Once Olivia implemented Customer.io, they got to testing their time-based theory right away. It turns out they were on to something – asking customers to connect their bank account one day after signing up yielded a 5.4% conversion rate, compared to their previous 2.2% conversion – a 2x increase in conversion!

With the solid evidence Customer.io is able to equip Olivia with, they can test and back up their hypothesis on best strategies to drive the highest results. Now, Olivia is taking a deeper dive into testing content including experimenting with subject lines, content, and more. Their latest experiment includes testing whether channel, push notifications, or email return the highest activation conversion. 

Multiple Workspaces are Safe Spaces

With audiences around the globe, Olivia requires a high degree of complexity in segmentation across multiple languages and differentiating between their B2C and B2B products. 

On their previous provider, they weren’t able to keep their Irish and Portuguese audiences separate. With no clear delineation between the two customer bases, they once accidentally blasted their Irish audience with an email in Portuguese. 

“Human error is a part of life but if we can avoid it, that’s ideal. With separate workspaces, I can keep our users’ information separate to avoid errors, and avoid having to send apology emails.”

–Heloisa Assis, Marketing Manager

While there is never fully escaping human error, Customer.io’s multiple workspaces greatly reduce the likelihood of a mixup. Olivia keeps their Irish, Portuguese, and B2B audiences separated into different workspaces with their corresponding data and associated API calls in Customer.io. Now, Olivia can confidently send emails without fear of mishaps.

Not only do they separate out their workspaces by countries and products, but they also created a ‘Dev Workspace’. They dedicate this workspace to sending transactional messages that transcend their whole user base, regardless of country or product.

Data Access: The Fuel to Segmentation 

The Olivia marketing team was limited by the time it took them to request and manually create segments. This process previously took up to 2 weeks due to the multiple teams involved and security compliance in pulling users’ email addresses. 

Thanks to Customer.io’s ability to create manual segments through a user’s unique ID instead of by email, segmenting only takes a click of a button and a few seconds to generate. Olivia’s marketing team no longer has to rely on a member of their data team and be tied down with these long security protocols. 

Now with accessible segmentation, they’re able to easily compile lists of customers who have asked for a specific feature to be developed and message them when it launches – helping to drive personalization and the 1:1 feeling the brand aspires to have with their customers. 

“Recently, I created a segment for people who had asked for a feature we were launching. Those emails perform really well because people know that we’re paying attention to what they’ve asked for. With Customer.io, it’s really easy and saves me a lot of time.”
—Heloisa Assis, Marketing Manager

A True Partner

When things go wrong, you need to know your vendor has your back. Reaching a real person when things were going sideways with MailChimp was nearly impossible. As a team that needs to move fast, waiting days for an issue to be resolved was bottlenecking their marketing efforts. That’s why Olivia has loved their dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Customer.io, who not only responds quickly, but proactively surfaces and resolves issues before they even have the chance to become apparent. 

In one instance, their CSM spotted an individual sender who was bringing down their deliverability rate in their shared IP. Before Olivia had the chance to notice the effects of this, their CSM had already moved them to a better-performing IP. 

Additionally, while Olivia knew that warming up their IP during implementation was going to be a process, it was a big reassurance when their CSM validated that they should send a consistent flow of emails so the IP could warm up to them (though it seemed counterintuitive). While this is a tactic they originally hesitantly had in mind, it was nice to have confirmation that it was the right move. 

Final Thoughts

As Olivia’s marketing team evolves to move faster and more accurately, Customer.io is there with them to help them along the way. With the power to test their theories for optimal results, separate their workspaces, make segmentation accessible, and benefit from the guidance of their CSM, their team is able to more than double their onboarding activation rate, create a more personal relationship with the customers, and get valuable time back.

Case Studies

Demand Curve

Why Demand Curve Trusts Customer.io Over Anyone Else

Written by Lucy Wen on .

Demand Curve is dedicated to teaching companies, from startups to enterprise-sized businesses, the best of modern marketing techniques. They are on a mission to equip companies who don’t have the traditional resources by designing tailored growth programs that teach their clients everything from content marketing, landing page creation, market research, acquisition strategy, and more. Demand Curve is inspired by the marketing agency model but puts a spin on it by crafting strategic digital courses for all of their customers’ marketing needs. With Customer.io, they found the platform they could trust to deliver their marketing wisdom to help their customers grow.

Demand Curve has developed a sophisticated email program composed of several different messaging types within Customer.io:

  • A bi-weekly Growth Newsletter
  • Top of funnel conversion, i.e. follow-up emails for leads who expressed interest or requested a demo
  • Educational onboarding campaigns
  • Transactional receipts and confirmation emails
  • Re-engagement for inactive users
  • Emails soliciting feedback from customers

By building various messaging campaigns in one platform, Demand Curve can easily see and control all the messages they send their customers.

But it wasn’t always that simple.

The Journey

Before Customer.io, Demand Curve tried many different messaging platforms, including MailChimp, Intercom, Active Campaign, and Rejoiner. When they found Customer.io, a weight was immediately lifted off their shoulders. Finally, a platform they could trust with all the logic and flexibility needed to achieve their messaging goals, packaged in an easy-to-use user interface.

As seasoned marketers themselves, they already had a clear vision for their messaging approach. They knew which events they needed to send into Customer.io, which messaging features were crucial, and which integrations were required.

Unlimited Events, Limitless Possibilities

Rich event data can make or break campaign aspirations. Demand Curve knew that to achieve the engagement and re-engagement results they wanted, they needed a platform that could process vast amounts of user activity data.

Some platforms, including Intercom, limit you to only 10 attributes on any event, with any additional attributes automatically dropped. That hard limit was a hard-pass for Demand Curve. Customer.io has an event attribute limit of 100,000 bytes.

Deliverability You Can Count On

Deliverability was also an ever-challenging battle for Demand Curve while they were with other messaging providers. With Intercom, they had to be on a shared IP, with no option to be on a dedicated IP. Since switching to Customer.io, they’ve seen a drastic improvement with their deliverability because they can be on their own dedicated IP with fewer restrictions on who they are able to email their newsletter to – which now has a 40-50% open rate. 

With previous providers, Demand Curve found their analytics to be inadequate for what they needed. Customer.io provides analytics on performance and delivery on both a high-level and campaign-specific, which gives Demand Curve the ability to pinpoint what is working and where they need to pivot based on actionable insights within their dashboard.

Ease

Customer.io tries to make the road as easy as possible for customers to migrate their data into the platform, so that they can get started right away on building out complex campaigns with multiple event triggers and conditions.  

“The onboarding experience at Customer.io was so great. Segment has the ‘replay’ feature, so it was super easy to switch over. Other companies claimed to have easy integrations with Segment but we found out the hard way that it wasn’t true.” 

– Neal O’Grady, Co-Founder of Demand Curve

In the past with other messaging providers, they found that implementation wasn’t as easy as advertised. With ActiveCampaign, for example, they were never able to actually hook up Segment, rendering the platform unusable to them. 

With Customer.io, Demand Curve estimates they save at least 4 hours a month on manual work, such as uploading CSVs. 

Another one of the reasons Demand Curve moved to Customer.io was how easily they could customize emails in the platform.  

“With Intercom, you have to do everything in HTML and we don’t always have a technical person for that.”
–Neal O’Grady, Co-Founder of Demand Curve

With Customer.io’s easy-to-use platform, anyone within Demand Curve can create complex campaigns, without a dedicated employee.

Takeaways

Trust is at the core of everything Demand Curve does. Because of the nature of their consulting business, it’s crucial that they be able to communicate their expertise to their audience to foster trust. They’ve loved using Customer.io to push out newsletters that provide value to their audience, make announcements, collect feedback, and show their audience that they are a reliable source of knowledge.

Knowing what you want your messaging strategy to do is only half the battle when it comes to performing. Having a messaging partner that enables that vision is an underrated challenge to accomplishing your goals. With Customer.io, Demand Curve has been able to send messages to over 1.5 million profiles and rests easy knowing that those messages are delivered.

Case Studies

TryHackMe

TryHackMe’s 10% Monthly Revenue Growth

Written by Lucy Wen on .

TryHackMe is an independent online learning platform started in November 2018 that is training over ½ a million people on cybersecurity. Their focus is on product development and teaching people everything from the fundamentals to complex topics so they can secure careers in cybersecurity. 

When TryHackMe first joined Customer.io, they had 60,000 members. With the help of Customer.io’s platform, they’ve been growing 10% month over month! In fact, in the 6 months prior to this interview in Summer 2021, TryHackMe has received over 250,000 new sign-ups. 

TryHackMe’s Goals

TryHackMe came to Customer.io wanting to send better-targeted emails to their users based on their experience levels. Before Customer.io, they were discerning on who they were blasting emails to in their database, and they wanted to take a more personalized and segmented approach to messaging to increase their revenue. Their idea when they first came to Customer.io was to do this by configuring automatic campaigns to convert more TryHackMe users on their freemium model into paying subscribers. 

TryHackMe tried out a few other email service providers such as Mailchimp, Optiverse, and Hubspot but ultimately decided to go with Customer.io for our ease of implementation, complex workflow capabilities, and messaging expertise. 

Implementation

With Customer.io’s one-click integration with Segment, TryHackMe’s customer data platform, we make implementation a breeze, which is an important gateway for scrappy startups who may not have the dedicated resource or time to configure their data. 

“Mailchimp was so difficult to integrate and required so much manual work. The implementation was so easy with Customer.io, the automatic setup and integration. With a click of a button, we were able to immediately start sending campaigns to our users. Plus they didn’t have the workflows Customer.io does.”

– Ben Spring, Co-Founder of TryHackMe

The plight of being a fast-moving start-up means that you really have to do just that…move fast. With limited dedicated resources and time, a speedy but accurate configuration is really important. Once configured, speed in execution is also important.  

Scalability with Workflows

“In terms of scalability, we’ve seen explosive growth and Customer.io has scaled with us. We’ve had no bottlenecks because your product and your team supports us.”

– Ben Spring, Co-Founder of TryHackMe

Since starting with Customer.io, TryHackMe has been able to achieve a 13.7% conversion on their campaigns aimed at acquiring paying subscribers. With over 250,000 people in this cadence, this is a huge return on investment.

“The appeal of Customer.io is that it makes our lives so much easier. We were using a ton of different tools before and now with Customer.io, we don’t have to spend hours configuring different emails. We can drag and drop, easily make campaigns, and all of our emails live in one centralized place where we can have anyone on our team access and configure campaigns and broadcasts.” 

– Ben Spring, Co-Founder of TryHackMe

One way TryHackMe has been able to grow using Customer.io was to start getting more granular with their broadcasts, which is a huge part of their messaging strategy that they weren’t able to do with Mailchimp. With Customer.io, they are now able to segment users based on their experience and behavior to send them people personalized messages.

Expertise

An integral part of TryHackMe’s experience with Customer.io has been leveraging our messaging experts to help their organization sculpt the perfect messaging strategy.

“Your team has been really insightful in teaching us how to scale and grow our messaging strategy, especially with A/B testing and equipping us with the right techniques to grow our revenue”

– Ben Spring, Co-Founder of TryHackMe

At the time of this study, TryHackMe had just started running an A/B test on 2 campaigns where they want to track how a user is performing after they’ve gone down the cadence. Within 1 week, they’ve already seen a 2% increase, which is huge when you’re considering ¼ million people are in the cadence. All these little percentage bumps make a huge impact on revenue. 

Takeaways

It can be tricky to find the right messaging platform for now and for the future. With Customer.io’s touch of a button migration process, TryHackMe was able to get up and running immediately and start scaling. With any members of their team being able to go into Customer.io making growth such as 10% month-over-month revenue growth possible.

Mido Lotto

How Mido Lotto Hit the Jackpot with 3X Conversion with SMS

Written by Lucy Wen on .

The Challenge Needing to create programmatic nurture campaigns to build trust and convert users into paying customers

The Fix Experimentation with SMS as a messaging channel and creating onboarding campaigns based on user behavior

The Result Mido Lotto saw a 3x conversion rate with dormant users going back to the app and purchasing tickets after experimenting with SMS. They also saw a 2000% increase in paying customers and an 1875% increase in registered users within a year of using Customer.io

Mido Lotto is an online platform that allows users to play the Lottery in a modern way: digitally. Their app allows users to order Lottery tickets, manage those orders, check tickets, and instantly collect winnings for state-licensed Lottery games online, directly from their phones.

When Mido Lotto first started with Customer.io, their main driver was to create programmatic nurture campaigns to convert registered users on the app into paying customers. With the help of Customer.io’s powerful marketing automation, Mido Lotto has been able to grow paying customers by 2000% and registered users by 1875% in just 1 year. The app has now reached hundreds of thousands of installs.

Mido Lotto uses Customer.io for 6 primary reasons:

  • New user onboarding nurture campaigns, with the goal of converting app registrants into  paying customers
  • Utility based reminders in the app, for example reminding people there’s a jackpot coming up
  • Retention Marketing 
  • ReEngagement of inactive users
  • Advertising promotions
  • Ad hoc for calendar based reminders and communications

Trust

There are many layers to any company’s messaging strategy, but a unique hurdle Mido Lotto has to overcome is instilling trust within their customers. The lottery is a notoriously challenging space to build trust and legitimacy in, so they rely on sending the right messages to the right people at the right time to build that confidence. 

“Communicating with our audience in the right way at the right time with the right messages is critical for us to convert non-paying users into customers, which is why we trust Customer.io to manage and help us with those communications tactics.”

–Hamish Elmslie, Chief Operating Officer

Mido Lotto’s onboarding workflow consists of over 40 unique messages that are geared towards getting a user comfortable enough with their brand and product to become a paying customer. Through Customer.io’s complex messaging buildout ability, they are able to nurture this trust programmatically over the course of a month.

Experimenting: Reengagement with Customer.io with SMS

“One of the greatest gifts Customer.io has given us is the ability to experiment, quickly refine, and iterate our strategy with clear results”

-Hamish Elmslie, Chief Operating Officer

As any fast-moving startup knows, having the prowess to think of new hypotheses, test them out quickly, then swiftly pivot is the lifeblood to growing your business. That’s a critical reason why Mido Lotto uses Customer.io.

One experiment Mido Lotto used Customer.io for was leveraging SMS to engage with dormant users. This was uncharted territory for Mido Lotto that ended up wildly successful. With an SMS campaign targeted at inactive app users, they saw users coming back and placing an order through the app at 3x the conversion rate! 

They’ve now harnessed the power of SMS, a traditionally challenging channel to get right, to learn how to communicate with their customers in a way that is personalized enough to convert users. With our integration with Segment, Mido Lotto is able to truly send hyper-targeted SMS messages based on user behavior.

“We use Customer.io to understand the difference between SMS push and email, and to understand which types of communication work best for each channel. It’s very easy to do with Customer.io and we’ve seen unprecedented results. “ 

-Hamish Elmslie, Head of Operations

Small Teams with Mighty Power

Being able to experiment with messaging techniques is only half the battle when you have a small team like Mido Lotto. With a small team, everyone has to wear multiple hats but more importantly, know how to wear the hats.

“As a startup, you might not have someone with 15 years experience with CRM or ESP tools on the team from day one. Customer.io is so intuitive that anyone in our organization can understand how to use the platform. Being able to build and launch complex automated campaigns with a small amount of resource is phenomenal.”

-Hamish Elmslie, Chief Operating Officer

Small teams need powerful players, and having everyone be able to perform complex tasks without the dedicated resources needed to execute is one of the foundations of any successful startup.

New User Onboarding Campaigns

Mido Lotto relies heavily on their new user onboarding campaigns, which are a set of emails and SMS messages geared towards making users comfortable enough with the brand and platform to become a paying customer. Through continuous A/B testing, they’ve been able to create a campaign that converts 16% better than their previous approach. At any given time, there are tens of thousands of people in this workflow, so a 16% increase makes a huge difference on revenue.

Takeaways

With the help of Customer.io, Mido Lotto has been able to scale their business at an incredible rate. Their ability to send hyper-personalized messages to the right people, at the right time, in the right channel has allowed them to garner the trust they need from their audience to gain traction in the Lottery space. The journey to gain this momentum wasn’t by chance, however. It took crafty trials and leaps of faith paired with a marketing messaging platform built to scale with them.

A Journey in Deliverability: How DoSomething Increased Their Open Rate by 180%

Written by Lucy Wen on .

DoSomething is the largest youth-led organization dedicated to activating young adults to change the world for the better through social change. Their social impact programming has mobilized millions of members from clothing half of America’s youth in homeless shelters, cleaning up millions of cigarette butts from the streets, to registering over 250,000 people to vote in the 2020 presidential election. Their digital platform mobilizes our youth to create better communities for everyone.

The Challenge Open rates down by 75%.

The Fix Deliverability fixes, Smart suppression, Segmentation

The Result 2.8x increased open rate (180% relative increase. 4.95% increased click-through rate (395% relative increase)

Challenge 

DoSomething saw membership open rates falling to ¼ of what they once were (a 75% decrease). As is the nature of nonprofits, membership is the backbone to what powers their mission, so declining open rates was having a direct and negative impact on their overall business and goals as an organization.

Realizing that open rates were falling was only half the battle. At the time, they had no idea why this was happening, let alone how to fix it. Deliverability can be a tricky puzzle to tackle, but with some few key recommendations from our powerhouse of Customer Success Managers, DoSomething was not only able to get their deliverability rates way above industry average, but are now armed with the knowledge and tools to be self-sufficient and run on autopilot. 

Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces

DoSomething has a database of millions of members. Before using Customer.io, they were sending all users in their database every email, regardless of their interests or demographic on MailChimp. This tactic dramatically works against your deliverability rate, which DoSomething came to learn the hard way. While they wanted to suppress their list and segment users, MailChimp simply didn’t have the capability to segment and suppress as accurately as they needed. Their open rates at the time were about 8%-9%, way below the industry average. 

“When we were on MailChimp, we had severe deliverability issues for 2 reasons. The first being that we weren’t able to be on our own dedicated IP like we’re able to on Customer.io. Our emails weren’t going where they needed to go. The second was our inability to filter out users, and clean up lists within Mailchimp.” 

– Anthony Aurrichio, Senior Manager, Digital Engagement at DoSomething.org

Since Mailchimp’s mandatory shared IPs did not have a strong reputation with Google, switching to a dedicated IP on Customer.io was a no-brainer for DoSomething, and a no-brainer for Customer.io to set them up on. However, when it comes to segmentation, the fix wasn’t as simple. Knowing they needed to suppress and filter out users was only half the battle…

Segmentation 

DoSomething was at a loss for how to go about segmenting their users. How do I formulate who is suppressed? What user attributes should we consider? When should we consider someone inactive? What event triggers make the most sense for us to build around? These were all hurdles DoSomething leaned on Customer.io to help build-out. This resulted in two jurassic changes: 

  1. Subscription center- Letting members choose which newsletters they wanted to opt into.
  2. Smarter segmentation – Understanding users and creating rules based on what they want from including:
    • Setting parameters around when users last engaged with the brand
    • Creating user journeys based on who you are (age, where you come from, what you said you were interested in) to deliver the right content to the right people
    • Event triggers that grouped certain users together based on actions they took

The Future is Clear and Bright

In addition to the more tactical recommendations surrounding segmentation setup, Customer.io was also able to equip DoSomething with the knowledge to strategize holistically when it comes to Deliverability. In fact, DoSomething now has a ~35-page ‘manifesto’ dedicated to deliverability that the company operates by, which Customer.io was able to partner with to help make it come alive. Some of the concepts we were able to coach DoSomething through were:

  • What are some best practices for warming up new domains? Should we also move to new IPs or is the new domain sufficient to protect our corporate email?
  • Is putting old emails on a suppression list or “do not email” list sufficient to mark them as unsubscribed? Or should we fully scrub old profiles? 
  • How should we go about creating our subdomains for different newsletters/corporate emails

From there, they were able to send emails with purpose and sculpt an intentional customer journey. They tiptoed into these concepts previously, but they didn’t have the support or the industry knowledge that Customer.io brought to go full throttle into mastering Deliverability. 

“The landscape of the industry is changing so much. We definitely rely on Customer.io’s expertise to stay in the know. The best practices we’ve learned from them allow us to be on autopilot and prevent issues before they have the chance to arise.”

– Jen Ng, Director of Product at DoSomething

“The landscape of the industry is changing so much. We definitely rely on customer.io’s expertise to stay in the know. The best practices we’ve learned from them allows us to be on autopilot and prevent issues before they have the chance to arise.” – Jen Ng, Director of Product at DoSomething

Results

With the combined power of being on their own dedicated IP, getting the right guidance from Customer.io’s expert Customer Success Managers on segmentation and setup, and harnessing the power of event triggers into their strategy, DoSomething was able to create a suppression policy that made sense for their inactive users, increasing their open rate by 2.8x, a 180% relative increase.

Not only that, but their average click rate increased by 4.95%, a 395% relative increase.

When compared to their metrics before implementing Customer.io, DoSomething has been able to maintain the same amount of click-throughs today as they previously were, with only sending 21% of their total email send volume.

How StuDocu Keeps Their 15 Million Global Monthly Users Engaged

Written by Lucy Wen on .

StuDocu is an online community where university and college students can exchange study resources, ask their peers questions, and get answers. Their community has members in over 60 countries, spanning 17 languages, with over 15 million monthly active users on their marketplace. 

StuDocu’s digital community consists of a marketplace where students upload documents so other students can learn and benefit from them. The documents that their users upload are what attract new users to the marketplace, who in return also contribute more content and documents. This contribution and consumption cycle is what keeps the marketplace alive, so user engagement on the platform is the lifeline of StuDocu’s business. With an audience spread all over the world, in different languages, timezones, and interests, it can be hard to send the right messages that actually engage their audience. That’s why StuDocu relies on Customer.io to give them powerful and actionable insights, segment users, and enable event triggers to keep their community alive and thriving.

StuDocu uses Customer.io for 4 primary reasons:

  • User Onboarding – Onboarding new users onto the platform to ensure strong retention.
  • Transactional Messages – Sending password resets, email confirmations, and account-based status updates.
  • Conversion Flows – Targeted campaigns to re-engage customers back onto the StuDocu platform, including automated platform activity notifications to stay top of mind. Note: This is the most crucial part of their business! 
  • Customer Feedback – Condition triggered messages to collect feedback and information from users. For example, asking students to rank their university or college for StuDocu’s World University Ranking.

Data in the Driver’s Seat

StuDocu is a data-centric company. They use customer data to drive all decisions, especially when it comes to their email campaigns and interactions. With the help of Customer.io’s super easy-to-understand data analytics, StuDocu is able to adjust their campaigns based on the actionable insights Customer.io delivers to reach an average open rate of 33%, with their highest campaign hovering at a 73% open rate.

StuDocu’s top-performing campaign is one of their most important campaigns to their business as it’s an email dedicated to driving the supply flow. They paired the data Customer.io yields along with A/B testing multiple variants to push their numbers way above the industry average to achieve a 10% click-through rate.

Additionally, with Customer.io, StuDocu is able to keep a single source of truth for each of their users. They use the platform as a database to track whether a user is properly flowing downstream in the user journey or not. If the user is not, StuDocu is able to pinpoint exactly what’s missing, what went wrong, and adjust their strategy to make sure the user is where they should be within their journey.

Segmentation

StuDocu sends roughly 2.3 million emails a month to users in over 60 countries and 17 languages. This high volume poses quite a challenge for their email team, especially when considering time zones. 

“Customer.io has been really great because we’ve been able to automatically set up when a campaign goes out based on our specific user’s timezone, giving us the highest opportunity for success. Sometimes these emails go out in the middle of the night in my timezone, so it’s nice to be able to schedule it.”

– Martine Peeters, Marketing and Communications Manager at StuDocu

With Customer.io’s segmentation engine, StuDocu is able to send the right emails to the right people, at the right time, in the user’s preferred language. Fundamental communication like this would be nearly impossible without the help of Customer.io. The ability to group users based on their location, the field of study, preferred language, and the university they attend empowers Marketers to deliver the most relevant information. As a result, you can see results like StuDocu’s high engagement and click-through rates.

The Power of Event Triggers

The other large piece of the puzzle contributing to StuDocu’s high-performing success is utilizing Customer.io’s event-triggered campaigns. StuDocu cleverly builds data-driven segments based on their users’ actions and automatically triggers campaigns when a user performs a specific event.

“Across all of our events, we send close to 1,000 unique event properties to Customer.io. They offer us the unique opportunity to leverage all of these properties to further personalize our email campaigns resulting in higher open and click rates. Other tools did not allow for this and it would require expensive additional development time to get all the relevant data to be available in our campaigns.”

– Lucas van den Houten, Cofounder of StuDocu

Since condition-triggered campaigns are triggered the first time a user matches a set of conditions, StuDocu can either “set and forget” or jump right in and start optimizing workflows based on how people are moving through the campaigns. This gives StuDocu the flexibility they need and want to deliver content that makes the most sense to their audience.

Takeaways

Connecting and engaging with customers is not an easy task when you truly have a global audience like StuDocu. The multiple time zones and languages can become challenging without the right tools, setup, and data-driven logic. StuDocu recognizes these challenges and is able to harness the power of Customer.io’s segmentation and event-triggered campaigns to send the best messages to the right audience and in the right language. Using Customer.io, StuDocu is able to level up their messaging and strategy to meet their engagement and business goals.