| Functionality | 6 <p>Customer.io focuses on delivering functionality that enhance customer engagement through highly personalised, data-driven messaging across multiple channels. It offers excellent, granular segmentation and flexible automation workflows across a wide range of channels. However, this means that compared to other Marketing Automation Platforms, Customer.io lacks some common functionality, e.g. creating landing pages, websites and signup forms.</p> | 5 <p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For small ecommerce businesses, Flodesk’s features are just right. The team has clearly chosen to focus on certain things and do them well.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We are concerned that custom fields can only take values of ‘string’ data type, so you can’t validate entries to, say, date or location type fields. Nor can you filter / segment according to the value of custom fields.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">As your needs grow and you want A/B testing, custom dashboards etc, you may outgrow the platform but it is solid for what it is.</span></p> |
| Ease of Use | 2 <p>Customer.io is designed for technical, data-driven teams.The emphasis on technical integrations and real-time data makes it more complex than many other marketing automation tools. To fully unlock Customer.io's power, you'll nede the technical expertise to manage data integrations, create advanced workflows, set up custom events and more.</p> | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Flodesk is one of the user-friendly email marketing platforms we have tested. With a simple interface and just 6 clearly labeled tabs, it's super easy to navigate between designing emails, creating forms and building out workflows. We particularly like its workflow builder, which makes it straightforward even for complete beginners to build an email series without guidance.</span></p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>We find Customer.io's interface visually acceptable, but largely just functional. The design's not fully responsive i.e. text escapes containers when browser window is shrunk. We also found page loads to be rather slow (e.g. 3-5 seconds), which quickly becomes painful.</p> | 9 <p>Flodesk offers a delightfully pleasant, modern, uncluttered interface that is straightforward to navigate. In addition, page load times were incredibly fast.</p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>Customer.io offers a high level of customisability in allowing you to tailor messaging campaigns extensively based on any data you bring in. You can create complex workflows with conditional logic, customize messages using dynamic content, and design personalized customer journeys based on detailed segmentation. However, note that this level of customisability can only be unlocked with technical expertise. Without code, Customer.io only offers a average/ below average level of customisability, especially in designing client-facing emails.</p> | 4 <p>There's a classic trade-off between ease of set-up and customisability. No surprises that there is little to customise with Flodesk. That should not be an issue for small businesses looking to grow via email automation. The time may come when you wish to have more control over custom dashboards and analytics but until then we are not concerned.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 2 <p>Given that Customer.io's focus on data-driven campaigns, there's a steep learning curve when it comes to setup.</p><p><br></p><p>In particular, basic setup can take more than an hour, and fully customising data panels and real-time data can take weeks.</p> | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We loved how quickly we could self-serve to create an account with very few clicks (via a Google account) and start creating emails, forms and workflows. Thanks to the 'forever free' tier, there is also no need to enter payment card details to access full functionality for the first 30 days.</span></p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>For personalised Q&A, you can submit a support request via Customer.io's platform (after getting past a somewhat unhelpful AI chatbot). We found the support team to be quick to reply (within 2 business hours), helpful and friendly. Their help centre is also of decent quality, with detailed guides and video walkthroughs.</p> | 8 <p>There is no live-chat functionality but our email query was helpfully answered in just 8 minutes. In addition the knowledge base of 'how to' articles is high-quality and easily searchable.</p> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>Customer.io excels in integratability, providing robust options to connect with various data sources and tools. It has excellent integrations with all of the most popular data sources and third-party applications, such as analytics, sales and content management tools. It also has a comprehensive APIs that supports custom integrations, allowing you to easily bring in real-time data from your own databases, data warehouses, websites, and applications.</p> | 3 <p>Direct integration is supported only for Instagram and Shopify. The Zapier store has a number of other integrations which may be useful and depending on your needs, you may have to create your own private connection via the Flodesk API.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>Key data (e.g. users, objects) can be easily exported to CSV format via self-serve. Customer.io is also designed to facilitate export customer data to most reasonably relevant third party tools e.g. data warehouse, analytics tools, CRMs via its API and pre-built integrations.</p> | 9 <p>In testing we could easily export the mailing list, a specific segment, and analytics (such as daily opt-in and visitor activity) to CSV without needing tech support.</p> |
