Skip to main content

How Notion Switched to Customer.io 8 Days Before Their Annual Renewal

Notion is an all-in-one workspace where you can write, plan, collaborate, and get organized. Notion strives to create a simple, beautiful, and easy-to-use product for their customers, which is one of the main reasons why they switched to Customer.io. They needed an automated marketing platform that matches their product: UI and support team that is intuitive, responsive, and fast.

It Started With a Tweet.

Notion’s Head of Growth, Jamie Quint, was frustrated with their current platform and went to Twitter for recommendations. After a conversation with our team, Jamie quickly learned that yes, we do support enterprise. Yes, you can use your own ESP. And yes, your event properties are first-class in our platform.

Winback For Due Diligence. 

Truth be told, Notion was previously a customer at the beginning of 2019 but decided to part ways for the same reason they have returned to us in 2020 – the UI and visual workflow builder. Listening to and acknowledging our customer’s feedback and their needs is a competitive advantage for us. 

We are continuously improving the platform to give our customers control and flexibility to craft and send data-driven emails, push notifications, and SMS messages. Plus, we now offer Professional Services to jump-start our customers for long-term success, which was one of the main selling points for Notion when considering the switch.

The Race Was Not Against the Competition, but With Time. 

Eight days. That’s how long Notion had before their annual contract renewed. Eight days to find and migrate to a new platform, or keep using their existing platform and stay unhappy and frustrated.

After an initial conversation and a demo to show off the platform, Notion was sold on the features, platform performance, and overall UI of Customer.io. But the challenge was migrating before their contract renewed.

Notion ultimately agreed to switch messaging platforms under one condition: our team had to fully migrate Notion’s messaging strategy before their renewal date. That’s where Professional Services came in.

It Was Go Time. 

The Services team dove headfirst into the work tackling Notion’s most effective and most complex campaign first. Recreating the multi-split branch campaign that had several twists and turns all in support of an organization experiencing astronomical growth.

Conscious of the imposed deadline and the fragility of data, a data migration was performed to ensure uninterrupted communication with Notion’s expansive user base during the transition. Validating the data sent to Customer.io, and verifying it aligned with the messaging strategy, gave Notion peace of mind. 

Without letting off the gas, our Engineering experts were helping out in parallel. Provisioning dedicated hardware (as part of Notion’s customized plan) to serve their substantial sending volume and anticipated growth. 

We promised to fully migrate Notion’s messaging strategy before their renewal date, and we did just that.

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered.

In less than eight days, Notion had parity with their old system. What’s more, they found quality-of-life improvements in a faster campaign building experience, segment build times, and an incredible UI. Jamie Quint gave high praise to the team and said “You guys did a great job for us.“

“The Pro Services team at Customer.io was critical in expediting our migration to their platform. They were communicative, experts in the platform, and incredibly efficient. Without their help and flexibility, we may have dropped important communications to our customers, and worse yet, been stuck on a platform that wasn’t working for us.”

Blending Customer.io’s powerful automated messaging platform and the value of Professional Services, the decision for Notion to switch to Customer.io was easy.