How We Use Customer.io Webhook Actions to Push Data Into Salesforce

Measuring and optimizing the customer funnel effectively is a priority for many companies that make and sell web and mobile products.

As the resident marketing operations nerd on the team, I knew we had to be able to work towards four operational goals to ensure we’re efficiently and constructively growing our customers here at Customer.io:

• effectively measure each stage of the funnel
• have a clear view of how prospective customers moved through our world
• use data collected from multiple systems to drive sales communications
• use sales interactions to customize marketing communications

But we needed to better align marketing and sales to make this a reality. This meant enabling the marketing and sales teams to continue doing what they did best in their particular stacks while making sure consistent data streamed through those tools in real-time. Luckily, the timing of the Customer.io Actions launch lined up perfectly with our decision to better align marketing and sales with data flow.

Actions makes it possible for our customers to leverage the behavioral data that’s already flowing through into Customer.io to trigger messages in channels beyond email. With Webhook Actions, for example, you can to send that data to any third-party service with a public API.

It made sense to be the first guinea pig to configure and use Webhook Actions to push data from Customer.io into Salesforce. We’d open up the possibilities of using Customer.io beyond empowering marketers to message users based on behavioral data — to also empowering sales with more context to provide a better personalized, helpful sales experience. Here’s what we did:

Using Customer.io Actions to Align Marketing and Sales With Data

Customer.io gets to work after an integration with your web/mobile product or service. Our own integration setup involves user data from our app flowing into our Customer.io account via Segment (meta, right?). That data includes not just information like who’s signing up but also what they’re doing inside our product.

After creating webhook integrations between Customer.io and Salesforce, we’re able to curate and push any piece of that behavioral data into Salesforce. Here are 3 workflows we created in our first month after implementing Customer.io Actions and Salesforce:

1. Pushing signups into Salesforce

As with many SaaS products out there, people can sign up quickly for a Customer.io account to take a look around and kick the tires themselves without having to wait to see the product in a demo. Our sales team plays a role in guiding new signups through the consideration and purchase phases, and beyond.

So it’s critical that the sales team knows who is creating accounts. We use Customer.io Actions to push all new leads into Salesforce.com:

The Action includes data from the registration form fields, like company and contact estimate.

2. Updating lead records with email address verification

We require new signups to confirm their email address (to help keep spammers at bay as well as ensure the person who signed up is who they say they are). So we decided to also update Salesforce lead records when people complete that email confirmation step.

That keeps the sales pipeline free of accounts that never bothered or wanted to actually use Customer.io.

3. Updating lead record with key product usage

We also send an update into Salesforce when an account is over their free limit of 200 profiles and 400 messages. Surpassing that benchmark of activity after signing up is a good sign of engagement that our sales team can then take action on.

Here’s what the Salesforce webhook Action looks like in our composer. You’ll see that we use Liquid to pass through the account details into the Salesforce fields.

Here’s how that looks like in the Salesforce dashboard for a lead who has both verified their email address and gone over the free account limit:

As a marketing ops nerd, I’m very excited! We’re using Actions to integrate with Customer.io and Salesforce to equip our marketing and sales team with more flexibility and power, with less reliance on our dev team to build us custom solutions.

The possibilities of what we can choose to send over to Salesforce are huge, and the fact that we can curate what information to send and when makes sure that the data flow doesn’t become a useless firehose of information. Plus, the sales team can do their job without having to constantly switch to other tools.

A few things we’re still working on and would love to share in the future is how we’re using product activity and engagement levels to add context to leads in Salesforce as well as power lead nurturing and winback campaigns. Stay tuned!

Head here for a step-by-step walkthrough of how to push leads into Salesforce from Customer.io with a Webhook Action.