Hey guys, I'm one of the founders at Outbound. We're trying to build the most developer friendly marketing automation solution -- so we appreciate any feedback from the community. Happy to answer any questions.
Hey this is Josh, the other Outbound founder. Good question, sandstrom. The key difference with Customer.io (other than SMS and mobile push) is that we're built on your event stream: we use events to send messages but also to tell you what effect each message you send has on customer actions inside your product.
Interesting. Definitely useful since most the marketing automation tools I've used are just email focused. Can we look forward to a Zapier integration?
What kind of zapier integration would be most useful? Would it be best if we hooked up with salesforce, or other larger providers? Or just expose zapier hooks for our APIs?
Hey Dhruv! The cool thing is if you expose some triggers and actions via an app, your users can decide how to hook it into other apps (like Salesforce, etc.)
Perhaps things like:
- Trigger when a message is opened
- Trigger when a message is sent
- Trigger when a new contact is added (if you have lists)
Product looks great -- definitely agree that the ability to integrate w/ other tools like salesforce would be really useful. How do you guys differentiate vs intercom?
Good question on Intercom, alishiu. Here is how we think about this:
Intercom, true to its name, is a really nice tool for 2-way communication with your users. Here's where it shines:
1) Visibility: It acts as a CRM that auto updates - it automatically shows you what each user has done and lets you build rich profiles from their interactions with your app and your communication history.
2) Conversations: Intercom is wonderful at initiating conversations via email or in-app messages based on what your users are doing. You get a granular sense of what is going on with each user and so it's easy to talk with them about it.
3) Handholding: The lines between onboarding, product feedback and support are very fuzzy. Intercom helps you handhold your users through your product, heading off some support tickets before they happen and helping you understand at a very basic level what it takes to make an active, engaged customer.
Where Intercom is not as strong is:
1) Scaling communication for a large number of users: It's hard to have these 2-way conversations with your users as you scale up. You can do some automation with Intercom but building sophisticated business logic based on combinations of events and user attributes is difficult.
2) Mobile: They don't do native mobile push or SMS, both of which are very important touch points if your users primarily interact with your product on mobile or on the go.
3) Testing and analytics: It's very useful to have deep analytics (not just clicks and opens) and a testing infrastructure, including control groups, that allows you to try things quickly. The key thing here is that it is not enough to know how many messages you send to users and how many users took an action - you need to understand how many users took a particular action BECAUSE they got a message.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadPerhaps things like:
- Trigger when a message is opened
- Trigger when a message is sent
- Trigger when a new contact is added (if you have lists)
etc. Happy to answer any questions, you can also shoot me an email. https://zapier.com/developer
If you're hooked up with Segment.io, it's just a flick of a switch.
And of course if you need any help, you can always write in to support [at] outbound.io and we'll be right on it.
Intercom, true to its name, is a really nice tool for 2-way communication with your users. Here's where it shines:
1) Visibility: It acts as a CRM that auto updates - it automatically shows you what each user has done and lets you build rich profiles from their interactions with your app and your communication history.
2) Conversations: Intercom is wonderful at initiating conversations via email or in-app messages based on what your users are doing. You get a granular sense of what is going on with each user and so it's easy to talk with them about it.
3) Handholding: The lines between onboarding, product feedback and support are very fuzzy. Intercom helps you handhold your users through your product, heading off some support tickets before they happen and helping you understand at a very basic level what it takes to make an active, engaged customer.
Where Intercom is not as strong is: 1) Scaling communication for a large number of users: It's hard to have these 2-way conversations with your users as you scale up. You can do some automation with Intercom but building sophisticated business logic based on combinations of events and user attributes is difficult.
2) Mobile: They don't do native mobile push or SMS, both of which are very important touch points if your users primarily interact with your product on mobile or on the go.
3) Testing and analytics: It's very useful to have deep analytics (not just clicks and opens) and a testing infrastructure, including control groups, that allows you to try things quickly. The key thing here is that it is not enough to know how many messages you send to users and how many users took an action - you need to understand how many users took a particular action BECAUSE they got a message.