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Customer.io Actions — Send messages across any channel - from push to postcards
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@smalter Thanks Walter! Great question.
Brand evolution is definitely a work in progress! It helps that Actions connects right back to the founders' original vision to make behavioral data so often reviewed and yielding insights in analytics tools more actionable.
The core stuff remains the same: use your behavioral data in smart ways to communicate with your users and customers like human beings, by providing relevant, valuable content and messages. That's how you build engagement and trust. Actions will open up the means of how to do that.
The tough thing is that yeah, we're known for being email-only and that's something to break through — with more great content and education about behavior and retention marketing.
Many of our growth marketer customers were hacking together processes by stitching together systems and tools with Customer.io already, even before the release of Actions like Mention's cool NPS process. So we're excited about telling more stories and ways to do cool, powerful stuff like that!
Thanks for hunting us today @nbashaw! We’re super excited about this launch and to share it with the PH community!
Thought I'd share some more specifics about this feature:
Actions hooks up our segmentation and rules platform used to power triggered emails to other tools via webhook to send more than email. Now you can leverage behavior data to trigger messages in other channels or create some neat automated workflows between Customer.io and other tools.
Some possibilities:
- send an SMS or push notification to your customers
- trigger a notification to a Slack chatroom
- add CRM lead update for your sales team
...all based on the behavioral data that’s flowing through Customer.io. You can connect to any product with a public API, and we’ve created setup guides for 11 tools for those of us less familiar with webhooks.
This is something that @alphacolin has been wanting to build, ever since the start of the company 4 years ago — when he and @jrallison were thinking about building a product to manage customer inputs and outputs. They'd kept hearing that people wanted to be able to act on their data to drive behavior change.
I’m sure @alphacolin will chime in as the west coast awakens. We’ll be around today to answer your questions and hear cool ideas for how you might use Actions!
Hey Product Hunt, I'm Colin, CEO of Customer.io. Happy to answer any questions you have about our release of Actions or anything in general!
@alphacolin interested to know how you plan on handling SMS with all of your clients. It's all well and easy enough to connect to Twilio's API however it's a completely different beast to scale and engage your SMS service globally. The regulations in the US/Canada are archaic at best. Any thoughts of going into OTT as well?
@hook_taylor We're early in our understanding of the nuances of global SMS. Conceivably, Customer.io could handle the intelligence of which SMS provider to use depending on region of the recipient, but that isn't a feature we're currently evaluating.
As for OTT, I've been impressed by MessageBird's offering: https://www.messagebird.com/en-u... . Our main goal with this first release of actions was to get a foundation to quickly respond to needs and demands from customers.
Would be interested to chat more! I'm colin @ our domain...
@hook_taylor @alphacolin Wow, thanks for the mention Colin! Glad to hear you like our product :)
Global SMS service is definitely a project on it's own, but it's definitely doable. At MessageBird we take all local regulations into account, and actively advice our users on what to do and what not to do. In some countries, like the US and Canada, we require our users to go through a short approval process before sending messages there.
If you want more info, shoot me email at joey @ messagebird!
I've been using Customer.io pretty extensively for the last few years. I love it when the companies you use continue to invest so much energy into making an already great product even better. I can't to try this out!
CIO team, keep rocking!
@carlsednaoui Thanks Carl! I'm excited to see the new stuff you build with Actions.
Customer.io has been an awesome tool we've been using ourselves for over a year now. I've used a lot of marketing automation / email marketing tools in the past and Customer.io combines ease with power.
I'm very excited for my company, Lob.com, to have have an integration with Customer.io actions!
@elizabethhunker If you want to connect service a to service b and make things happen (is this oversimplified @wadefoster?), that's what Zapier does amazingly well. We expect a lot of customers to use Actions to connect Customer.io to Zapier for that reason. We store data about customers and their behavior and make it usable for automation where Zapier doesn't seek to do that.
Historically people used Customer.io as the place they manage and send all their transactional, behavior-based and newsletter *emails*. Now, our focus is on helping your business use your customer & behavior data to better communicate across *any* channel.
Hope that helps clarify the difference!
@elizabethhunker Zapier is great for connecting tools - (we even have a Zapier webhook action walkthrough ) .
Customer.io Actions is a different animal :) If you have a web or mobile product with users who create accounts — you integrate with our platform first. That gives you the ability to use a pretty powerful segmentation and logic engine to dynamically group your users based on behavior and other attributes — and then target your automated messages. Actions expands our platform to other channels and tools beyond email.
Hope that helps to clarify!
Looks like a nice CRM. I like that you can integrate it with other platforms like Slack.
@davidmilbergnyc Thanks so much David! We're mainly a messaging platform with some CRM-ish aspects since user + behavior data flows through and is managed in Customer.io.
@matsilva Thanks Mat! Do you already have a push provider? Hope you check us out and let us know if you have any questions!
This looks very awesome. I don't see browser push notifications mentioned, although I do see plenty of flexible 3rd-party API integrations. Would this work with, say, onesignal.com ?
@lee_peterson Hi Lee! From a quick look at their API, it looks like it should be possible to trigger Browser push in Onesignal from Customer.io: https://documentation.onesignal.... .
Thanks for letting me know about Onesignal! One of the goals of releasing the v1 of this feature was to learn with our customers what they want us to hook in to so we can make that easier.
@lee_peterson Thanks for the question, Lee. The powerful secret behind Actions is that you can format your own web request and drop it into a campaign. From the look of onesignal's API you should be able to format a browser push with an Actions webhook straight to their REST API
👉 https://documentation.onesignal....
As time goes on we'll be adding to our guides/documentation to show of more powerful ways to connect to compatible services, but there are thousands of APIs you should be able to connect with today.
We've also added a form to our page for any more Actions you'd like to see. Definitely let us know if more come to mind!
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