Mailgun is an industry-leading email service provider (ESP) with a developer centric focus and product offering. Founded in 2010, Mailgun uses the power of its email API combined with its deliverability services to ensure their customers are getting the highest rates of deliverability in the industry.

Challenges with Ads

Historically, paid ads through Google have been the main focus of Mailgun’s paid media strategy, with two goals:

• Driving signups for their core email API product
• Driving leads for their deliverability services

Mailgun’s target buyer persona tends to be software developers.

“This crowd is very in-touch with the tech community and a traditionally tough group to market to,” Nick Lafferty, Mailgun’s Paid Search Manager, explained. “You’ll see competitors in our space getting trolled on Reddit and other places where devs hang out for their marketing tactics –– we have to be careful not to be that company.”

This makes it increasingly important for Mailgun to run authentic paid Google ad campaigns that speak to real problems their users are having. While Mailgun’s marketing team already had the ability to segment their specific audiences, the entire process getting these segments into Google Ads as a customer match audience was still entirely manual.

This meant manually uploading segmented lists as CSVs and pairing with the right messaging every day. The uploading alone takes away valuable time and effort that could be spent towards more meaningful tasks, like evaluating the performance of different campaigns or identifying new segments.

A New Focus with Customer.io

Nick is a newer member of Mailgun’s team and part of the refreshed focus and initiative into Maillgun’s paid media strategy. Additional spend, channels, and segmentation have all been a core focus, with the idea of building the Mailgun brand in the minds of its customers and driving conversions and leads for their sales team.

With these refined initiatives, Nick and his team were looking for a tool that could help them streamline their processes and provide opportunities to improve their already successful campaigns.

Utilizing Customer.io’s Segmentation and Ad Audience Sync, Mailgun has been able to refine its audiences to stay true to that authentic voice they want to maintain by creating messaging they know will resonate to that particular audience.

Before, Mailgun was having to manually organize, segment, and upload audiences via CSV files, their process is much more streamlined with the ability to have this done automatically, and they’ve even been able to create new segments because they know the current ones are always accurate.

“Customer.io’s Ad Audience tool has been an amazing way to keep all of my core audiences automatically up to date. I used to upload customer lists manually which was a huge pain and lead to gaps in ideal targeting” says Nick.

The Mailgun team is targeting current, active customers, sales hit-lists of high value prospects, and cross-sell opportunities. Since Customer.io updates these audiences hourly, Mailgun never has to worry about the wrong persona getting served the wrong ad.

“It really shines as a ‘set it and forget it’ tool, so I never have to worry if my audiences are up-to-date and I can focus instead on running the best possible marketing campaigns to those users.”

Spending Time on What Matters

So much of running a successful ads program has to do with being able to spend your time effectively and efficiently.

“That’s exactly what this tool lets me do,” said Nick. “The ad audience tool lets me get past the tedious and boring stuff and lets me spend my mental capacity on creating awesome copy, visuals, and ads––with a strategy I know will resonate. That’s what it’s all about”.

Hey Jude saves people time and money with a 24/7 virtual assistant service that can take care of pretty much anything. Scoring a table, booking a trip, nabbing concert tickets, getting the perfect last-minute gift — Hey Jude makes it easy to get anything you need, anytime.

That kind of promise relies on personalized service and adaptability. So naturally, Hey Jude turned to Customer.io to make their messages as attuned to customer needs as their service.

Going beyond onboarding for higher conversions

Hey Jude originally implemented Customer.io just to handle basic onboarding: a welcome email and a message after users submit their first request.

But the company quickly realized that Customer.io could be much more powerful. “Our use of Customer.io morphed into actually trying to influence user behavior,” says Marcus Smith, Hey Jude’s Director & Innovation Architect.

“Our conversion rate from free trial to paying member was 6% before using Customer.io, and now it’s around 22%.”

Behavioral messaging helps them nudge customers along free trial user to paid subscriber. Marcus explains: “This is what I quite like about Customer.io. If someone submits their first task and doesn’t submit another task, we automatically fire off an email to say, ‘Hey, did you know you could do x, y, zed,’ or ‘Why don’t you load your card and do a transaction through us and see how beneficial that is to your life?’”

This helps customers get genuine value from the app and motivates them to convert to paying subscribers. “When they use our app to make a transaction, they really get the wow factor and see how the service saves them time.”

Hey Jude triggers an email to remind users of their remaining free tasks.

This targeted behavioral messaging approach has driven terrific results. “Using Customer.io has been awesome in helping conversions,” says Marcus. “Our conversion rate from free trial to paying member was 6% before using Customer.io, and now it’s around 22%.”

From easy implementation to ongoing improvements

Easy implementation was key in getting great results fast, as the team at Hey Jude didn’t have a lot of experience with behavioral data before they started using Customer.io. “The API was just incredibly easy. I think it took us half a day to set up, max,” says Marcus. “So we could quickly start pushing information up, and it was a piece of cake to start using it.”

By using Customer.io’s webhook action, Hey Jude also triggers push notifications. “It’s important that Customer.io is more than just an email system,” Marcus comments.

“The API was just incredibly easy. I think it took us half a day to set up, max.”

The power of segmentation in Customer.io gives Hey Jude lots of ways to improve. “The way we communicate through Customer.io is really good, so we’re going to expand it even more,” Marcus notes. “We’re planning to do some propensity modeling and machine learning to put people into certain segments and communicate in different ways based on that—we’re about to set up a heck of a lot more workflows!”

And because Customer.io provides rich analytics, Hey Jude can build on their success with ongoing improvements based on solid data. “We get reasonably good email open rates, but we want higher click-throughs,”’ says Marcus. “So we can actually analyze why we’re not getting conversions and have now started doing A/B testing on our campaigns.”

Driving better customer support with internal communications

Customer.io also serves as a customer intelligence tool to keep your team in the know and responsive to customer needs. “We use it as an internal tool too, which has been incredibly helpful,” says Marcus. Hey Jude asks customers to rate their satisfaction after each task, and Customer.io sends an alert to the team if a customer isn’t happy.

“If a task gets one or two stars, Customer.io fires off a Slack message to the team so our staff can call the client within minutes,” Marcus explains. “So aside from the customer tool, it’s actually great for us because we can fire off triggered campaigns internally, based on user behavior in the system that we might otherwise miss.”

When customer rates a task poorly, Hey Jude sends a follow-up email plus alerts the internal team via Slack notification.

Using Customer.io to support internal customer service needs is a clever way to get even more value from the tool, and another great example of how Hey Jude responds to customer behavior with targeted communication that drives conversion and retention. With their behavioral messaging strategy and the power of Customer.io, it’s no wonder Hey Jude’s free-to-paid conversions are soaring.

Arcadia Power knows their customers want to make choices that support their values — so they give their customers the power to choose 100% clean energy for their homes and make a difference in the world. Through Arcadia, you can purchase energy from wind or solar instead of coal, regardless of your utility provider or location in the US.

Arcadia Power has a strong engineering team, so when it was time to choose an email service provider (ESP), they first thought about building one themselves. But as experts in efficiency and smart choices, they knew a great solution would lighten the burden on their team — and they found one in Customer.io.

Better performance, testing, and segmentation

“Email is our primary way of acquiring customers,” notes Dalton Vogler, Digital Marketing Manager. That’s why it was crucial to carefully weighed their options in order to choose the right ESP. “We were looking at MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Emma,” says Dalton, “but they all seemed lacking in one way or another.” In the end, they found that Customer.io came out strongest. “A lot of performance features are just great in Customer.io,” Dalton notes. “It’s easily the best ESP I’ve ever used.”

“Really, it just works,” adds Justin Searles, Senior Fullstack Engineer. “We send thousands of requests a day through Customer.io to update different attributes, and it’s always worked. We love it.”

“We send thousands of requests a day through Customer.io to update different attributes, and it’s always worked. We love it.”

One key Customer.io feature that Arcadia Power relies on is the ability to test emails thoroughly. Dalton points out that “Customer.io lets you send test emails like every other ESP, but it’s one of the few that lets you put live data into your test email so you can see that all your Liquid tags are working.”

Another benefit of Customer.io that Arcadia Power relies on is the robust segmentation builder that makes personalized emails possible. “The segmentation is amazing and has been incredibly helpful for pinpointing all the nuances that we need for the company to function and send the correct emails,” says Dalton. “Customer.io lets us set much better drip parameters.”

“Around 34% of all the customers we’ve acquired since starting Customer.io have come from either drip or newsletter emails. That’s been our primary value with Customer.io.”

This has translated into efficient and effective customer acquisition. “Whatever we’re paying for Customer.io cost per acquisition is nothing compared to Facebook advertising, AdWords, and that sort of thing,” says Dalton. “Around 34% of all the customers we’ve acquired since starting Customer.io have come from either drip or newsletter emails. That’s been our primary value with Customer.io.”

Easy implementation makes the build vs. buy decision a no-brainer

From the engineering side, Arcadia Power knew that buying a solution made more sense than building one — as long as implementation was easy. With Customer.io, they found what they needed. “We had all the guidance we needed,” notes Justin. “The support docs were great.”

Implementing Customer.io lifted the burden from engineering. “From a dev standpoint, getting stuff over to Customer.io is really straightforward,” says Justin. “For example, I wrote a script to push all the new IDs up, and that was pretty straightforward, especially given the Ruby Gem. That was total, maybe 15 lines of code for everything. It was awesome.”

Sending data to Customer.io with Ruby (and other languages ) is easy. Identify calls send in information about a customer, and Track calls tell us what those users are doing in your app.

The combination of great performance, business-boosting features, and easy implementation has made Customer.io a key tool in Arcadia Power’s arsenal of powering business growth.

Photo-printing app timeshel knows how important relationships are. After all, their service is rooted in the joy of savoring memories and celebrating stories through printed photographs. That’s why their marketing approach is much bigger than just adding new users. They recognize the true value of a customer is not just acquisition, but retention. As co-founder Sean Pfitzenmaier notes, “Ultimately, what matters to us is the lifetime value of the customer.” And triggered behavioral messaging is the cornerstone of driving that loyalty. Customer.io gives timeshel the tools to do the deep segmentation and event-based messaging that lead to long-term customer retention.

You give value, you get value

Being helpful is the guiding principle behind timeshel’s messaging. So they make sure their communications respond to exactly what a customer has done and needs to do next. “Being a subscription service,” says Sean, “means there are certain actions we need the users to perform on a monthly basis. Encouraging them and holding their hands through each step winds up being beneficial for the customers and for us.”

“From the moment someone starts an account, we want to give them the little push they need to do the next thing”

That need to be helpful and personal made Customer.io an ideal choice for timeshel’s messaging. “From the moment someone starts an account, we want to give them the little push they need to do the next thing,” says Sean. Customer.io lets timeshel send the right message at the right time, tied to specific behavioral triggers. “We keep adding more events and attributes to personalize the user experience,” Sean notes, and Customer.io makes it easy.

A friendly, relevant, timely reminder that the user needs to finish setting up their story

Going beyond the old email model

That behavioral power is something timeshel couldn’t find with a simple ESP. “Other email platforms are pretty limited from a behavioral perspective,” notes Sean, and that limitation made it hard for timeshel to make their messages helpful. “But it’s clear that Customer.io was built with behavioral messaging in mind from the start,” he says, which means lots of options for segmentation and customer attribute data. So their mandate to send useful messages is easy to execute by tying messaging to user actions.

And timeshel relies on multiple messaging methods to reach people when it counts. Customer.io’s partnership with Urban Airship makes using both email and push notifications—triggered by customer behavior—seamless. “We were so excited when you released your Urban Airship integration,” says Sean. “That was a game-changer for us.”

Well-timed push notifications allow customers to avoid a lapse in print delivery

“Other email platforms are pretty limited from a behavioral perspective, but it’s clear that Customer.io was built with behavioral messaging in mind from the start.”

Driving strategy with key analytics

“At the beginning of the month, we do a Customer.io analysis,” says Sean, and they use the metrics to understand how their messages are resonating. One key insight had to do with their monthly email reminding users to upload photos to print. They noticed that the email always had tremendously high engagement and spurred a lot of activity—and they realized the message was an embodiment of their “always be helpful” messaging ethos. “We discovered that people relied on this message to get value from our service,” says Sean. “It wasn’t like a promotional email—it was more like a useful feature of our app.” When they realized how important this message was to maintaining engagement, they knew it would be even more successful—and helpful to customers—to send it through push notifications as well.

timeshel also used Customer.io as a vehicle for gathering customer input on their product strategy. They knew that feedback from their power users would be vital in developing a new photo album offering, so they used Customer.io data to identify and reach out to users whose voices they wanted to help shape the new product.

As Sean notes, “Analyzing our Customer.io campaigns gives me a lot of insights about our customers and our business.” And those insights, combined with timeshel’s commitment to meaningful messages, help create customer relationships that last. Building those long-term relationships is the force behind timeshel’s ongoing growth.