Getting Started: Workspaces

This document is part of a complete series on Getting Started with Customer.io.

A workspace is a container for people, campaigns, and messages. Everything you do in Customer.io, you do from within a workspace. You can have multiple workspaces, all with their own set of people, campaigns, and API credentials.

You can create multiple workspaces to serve different purposes. You might have workspaces to represent different organizations within your company, product families, apps, messaging purposes and so on. You can move between your workspaces from the upper left corner of the dashboard.

You can have as many Workspaces as you want; workspaces don’t cost you anything! For billing purposes, we use the total number of People associated with your account and the total messages sent from all your Workspaces combined.

While workspaces are separate containers, you can reuse import workflow actions (like message templates or delays) from campaigns in other workspaces. This can prevent you from having to manually recreate complex message templates.

Organizing people by ID or email

The major functional difference between workspaces is the unique key you use to identify people. When you create a workspace, you determine whether to identify and organize people in the workspace by id or email.

Use the id option for people who have an account with you, subscribe to your service, or are otherwise known users. The id you assign to people in Customer.io is likely a value that represents a person not just in Customer.io but across your other systems—you can represent a person by their actions both in and out of Customer.io.

Use the email option when working with marketing leads, prospective customers, or subscribers. These are people whose email addresses you know, but who haven’t generated an id in your backend systems yet—they haven’t created an account, made a purchase, or subscribed to your service yet.

We normalize IDs in email-based workspaces

When you add a person to an email-based workspace, we use the person’s normalized email address as their ID. For example, if you add “Person Person@eXaMpLe.com” to your workspace, you can reference them as simply “person@example.com”.

While email is the primary, unique identifier for people in email-based workspaces, we auto-generate unique, immutable ids for people in email-based workspaces. In general, you should reference people in email-based workspaces by email, but you can use the id to take advantage of services, APIs, etc where you need id value—like UTM tracking (Google Analytics, etc).