How Arcadia Power uses great email to power the clean energy movement
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.