The experts at Journy know all about creating rewarding journeys for their customers—as a travel concierge service, that’s the heart and soul of their business. They design personalized travel itineraries to match their users’ individual tastes and desires—but they realized that a customer’s journey through using their service was just as important as the vacation they booked. That’s why they turned to Customer.io. From acquiring new leads all the way through conversion and beyond, Journy uses Customer.io to drive customer engagement—and business growth. With Customer.io, Journy’s emails go much deeper than the “Dear {FirstName}” approach we’re all so familiar with, and instead line up with what customers are doing, thinking, and wanting in the moment.

Starting new travelers off on the right foot

One of Journy’s primary ways to gain new customers is running giveaways with brand partners. Once they get an entry, they use Customer.io to trigger targeted email communications—and track how they’re performing. Claire Zhang, Journy’s Growth Lead, notes that she uses Customer.io every day to monitor metrics. “I count on Customer.io daily to provide insights on one of our main marketing channels,” she says, and those insights have driven refinements to their process.

“We take the data that Customer.io reports,” says Claire, “and use the insights to improve our success.” That’s how Journy realized they needed to personalize their drip campaigns more. “We started off by putting everyone into one triggered campaign,” says Claire, “but we’ve refined that to treat brand-new sign-ups differently from more qualified leads.”

“I count on Customer.io daily to provide insights on one of our main marketing channels”

This shift has helped Journy engage with new leads more meaningfully. Claire explains: “Our initial onboarding email campaign for totally new new leads that come in from the giveaways introduces our service and leads users to fill out a form. People who click through and fill out the form are more qualified leads, so they enter a different campaign that’s focused on giving them a promo code and trying to get them to book as fast as possible.” This refinement has allowed Journy to drop lower-qualified leads into a newsletter campaign for ongoing engagement, while moving highly motivated users to a fast-track toward conversion.

Insight=improvement=increased engagement

Ongoing testing and analysis of the results is a key feature of Journy’s email marketing—it’s what allows them to continually improve outcomes. “The A/B testing features in Customer.io really helped us get some interesting insights,” Claire says. They recently challenged the conventional wisdom of shorter-is-always-better by A/B testing a traditionally short email with a quite long one.

Using AB testing, Journy could dispel one-size-fits-all content length myths.

“The results—it was like whoa! The conversion rate was three to four times better for the long email.” Journy realized that because users demand a high degree of trust from a travel service, they actually respond well to emails with lots of information. Claire points out that “longer copy actually worked better for us, which runs counter to conventional marketing wisdom, but is a very valuable insight to us.”

“The results—it was like whoa! The conversion rate was three to four times better for the long email.”

Keeping the connection after conversion

Journy doesn’t drop their tailored approach to email after users convert. In fact, Claire notes, “One of the reasons we migrated to Customer.io was for more options with transactional emails.” By leveraging Customer.io’s ability to capture any customer attributes they want, Journy drives customer loyalty with highly personal emails. “Being able to tag customers with any attribute data I want, and being able to use Liquid to personalize messages with that data has been great,” says Claire. “It’s like writing formulas in Excel, but being able to do that in email is cool.”

Action conditions help Claire tailor the messaging experience to Journy’s customers

Driving rapid growth with limited resources

“Customer.io is super valuable to us as a growth tool, not just an ESP,” says Claire. “We communicate with both customers and potential customers. And we’re starting to get a little more granular with targeting emails to new customers.” The wealth of integrations that Customer.io supports makes that easy.

“Our tech resources are pretty limited, since we’re a small company at this point,” Claire notes, so she’s especially appreciated Customer.io’s responsive support. “When I emailed Customer.io support, they were great—fabulous,” she says. “Someone from customer service actually gave me a clever idea for setting up a Zapier integration that solved a major problem we were having.”

“Customer.io is super valuable to us as a growth tool, not just an ESP”

Realizing new possibilities with Customer.io

“Having Customer.io in my toolbox just makes me feel like ‘Oh, I can do all of these things!’ when setting email strategy,” says Claire. “It opens up a lot of possibilities for us to communicate with customers, test different ideas, and find what really works.”

As Journy continues to grow and offer more travelers personalized service for their adventures, they see Customer.io as crucial in keeping their communications just as personalized and relevant. “We come up with so many ideas for new ways to talk to our customers in our editorial meetings,” says Claire, “and Customer.io is key in executing those ideas.”

Thinkful teaches people programming and design through online, project-driven courses and 1-on-1 mentorship sessions with experts. Founded in 2012, Thinkful boasts a stellar 70% graduation rate for its classes.

The power of relationships is integral to Thinkful’s success in getting people to stay the course — from face-to-face mentoring, weekly Office Hours, and supportive student communities. How does Thinkful convince people to sign up for those relationships?

How do you convince more leads to sign up to start customer relationships?

Reducing hurdles to signup is one main challenge for Justin Cudmore, Product Manager in charge of growth. He and the Thinkful team turned to Customer.io to nurture student relationships from top of funnel to enrollment.

Build Trust by Focusing on One-on-One Relationships

Selling an education product is all about building trust with individual people, not a bunch of numbers in a database. Rather than referring to potential customers as leads, Thinkful calls and treats them as students — real people, with unique learning goals, who might need a human to guide their decisions.

While automation has its place, nothing beats talking to a real person — and that’s a practice that email helps to scale. Justin explains, “That 1-1 connection is vital. With Customer.io, we’re able to segment prospective students and assign them an education advisor on our team who will talk to them, send them newsletters, and reach out when they visit a course page.”

An education advisor is just a message away, even in Thinkful’s newsletter

“After picking a course, they’re assigned a mentor. Most students go back to them with questions down the road and update them about new jobs — our favorite emails!”

“One of the benefits of using Customer.io is being able to map emails directly to our sales funnel.”

Map your emails to your sales funnel

Deciding whether to enroll in a Thinkful course, which takes two to three months to complete, is deliberate. “Education is a large commitment due to the price and time — so there’s a larger hurdle,” Justin points out. “For someone looking to spend $300-$1000 dollars per month on a course, we need many different stages than just ‘lead’ and ‘current student.’”

Thinkful tailors its communication with drip emails that respond to context, relationships, and engagement rather than just time elapsed. “One of the benefits of using Customer.io is being able to map emails directly to our sales funnel,” says Justin.

example of Thinkful’s Customer.io segmentation for triggering emails

Thinkful sends people down different campaign paths depending on various attributes and levels of interest — whether it’s a newsletter subscription or getting someone back on the phone after a missed call.

“Assigning a specific stage to any prospective student is really easy to set up. We look at our emails holistically to make sure [we take advantage of] different touch points but also try not to email too much.”

Nurture more customers, all in one tool.

The Thinkful team didn’t want to juggle these different stages with separate tools. Justin explains, “We were using three different email tools. My main goal was to consolidate under one, which is what we did with Customer.io.”

Now Thinkful uses Customer.io to send its “The Weekly Fill” newsletter, incorporating it into their funnel and bridging the divide between acquisition and activation. Following a short drip series, prospective students receive Thinkful’s newsletter — with curated educational links and showcasing success stories to “add context and make Thinkful real.”

“We’ve gotten a great response to The Weekly Fill,” Justin notes. “We’re nurturing this list of people who are not necessarily interested in a class right now, but may be in the future, so let’s find a way to draw them down the funnel with engaging content.”

click to see full newsletter sample

“The more we can share Thinkful’s values, the better prepared a potential student is to choose Thinkful. We’ve found it’s about when the timing is right for someone to take a course.”

Get the timing right while showing your value

With the ability to impact its sales funnel in one system, Thinkful can communicate its purpose and value proposition, while nurturing people towards their learning goals. “We’re trying to keep the community engaged and stay top of mind, but not be annoying. I want people to look at Thinkful as a place for continued learning,” explains Justin.

That strategy is paying off. After consolidating tools and mapping its sale funnel stages into Customer.io, Thinkful has seen overall open rates for its drip emails rise by 27%. What’s more, engagement with emails have shot up, with reply rates increasing by 67%.

“Every day I work to show potential students what the Thinkful experience is like,” Justin says. “Every product person’s job is to strip the clutter away and make things clear. That’s what we’ve tried to do with our email setup with Customer.io — give leads the right information at the right time.”