Customer.io's company blog on email and messaging automation, with posts on lifecycle emails, onboarding, deliverability and company news.
HN commenters mostly mention it as a product to try for sending behavior-triggered messages, and it posts job openings; the patio11 lifecycle email guest post is its best-known piece.
I have a love-hate relationship with data. Data is great for helping drive product, messaging, engagement, etc. However, most data ends up as noise. It's noise because it isn't actionable.
Ash Maurya wrote this great article on actionable metrics:
http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/07/3-rules-to-actionable-metrics/
In the end I think it depends on how you want to use the data.
Here are a few things that I find useful:
- calculating your ROI on customers by correlating marketing efforts with key metrics. Google Analytics is good for this as you can basically identify the customer origin with a marketing campaign and how they convert for key metrics.
- full funnel perspective and cohort charts for AARRR metrics (http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics.html). KISS Metrics and Mixpanel are great for this, but I still haven't found anything that does the Cohort diagrams that well.
- experimenting with messaging using A/B testing tools like Visual Web Optimizer (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/) which has it's own analytics.
- retention email marketing is great with Customer.io (http://customer.io/) but I have fairly limited experience with that.
Other tools include Statsmix (which I think is under-represented); it is pretty good for collecting custom event data.
Once you have the money for it, tools like Pardot are great for marketing overall. We just implemented this so I still don't have much experience with it personally. It's a full marketing…
customer.io |SRE | REMOTE | https://customer.io
We're an automated messaging platform to send targeted emails, push notifications, and SMS to lower churn, create stronger relationships, and drive subscriptions.
Come join our team and help solve some of the truly hard problems that come from working with 1000's of customers receiving and sending billions of messages per month.
We're also looking for site reliability engineers to join team. We already have a stable platform with excellent monitoring. However, we have also have a strong desire to improve things! Our infrastructure is based around heavily sharded MySQL, redis, kafka and home grown message queues and the majority of our platform is written in golang. Please join and help make our backend systems more reliable and scalable.
We have superb benefits and a great team to join, instruct and learn from. We're a profitable stable company that is growing at a steady and healthy rate. See https://customer.io/careers/ for more details.
At Customer.io, we're committed to building a diverse environment and encourage applicants from underrepresented groups. We want people with different backgrounds from the team we have today to bring their perspective and thoughtfulness to the work that we do and the culture we foster.
If you are interested drop me a line at matthew@customer.io and come join us!
Actually, you can market before you've written a line of code. Ideally you've figured out some pain point that Instahero will solve, so why not pitch that? "X sucks, and we're doing something about it"
Write a sales letter. A great example can be found here: http://charmhq.com/ Start collecting email addresses, and send a lot of mail keeping everyone abreast of your progress.
Blog a lot, either with product updates or educational posts about all things analytics. Check out http://greatemailcopy.tumblr.com/ and http://customer.io/blog, both of which are helping promote a non-released product.
My network is pitiful, yet I was able to get 300+ emails on my announcement list before launching. And when I flipped the switch, about 1/3rd of the list signed up within a day.
That's not true, by either the letter of the law or the spirit of it. I own a business, and I post my email publicly because I want people to contact me. Some of those people will be selling me things--I want that! It's true that I end up with a lot of spam as a result, and that sucks, but it's better than never receiving unsolicited business email.
Sending unsolicited email to consumers is, indeed, spam. B2B is different.
EDIT: CANSPAM (US) is a bit ambiguous on this point. (Helpful blog post: http://customer.io/blog/Send-email-without-unsubscribe-link-cold.html.) CASL, its Canadian equivalent (I'm Canadian) is very clear on this point, though--unsolicited B2B to a publicly posted email address is a-ok, as long as it's not automated.
Here's my current stack for our sales startup:
We split out cloud costs using the free tier for google cloud and aws. So all of us kind of pool our resources together so that we keep costs low across accounts.
https://cloud.google.com/free
https://aws.amazon.com/free
We're getting some stuff going with AI so we just use everything that's open source on huggingface:
https://huggingface.co/models
then the key thing is when we reach our for services that you would normally have to pay for we explicitly ask if they have a bootstrapped program. like we tell them we're bootstrapped and as what they can do for us:
We use this for customer outreach for example https://customer.io/startup-program/bootstrapped/
Customer.io (https://customer.io) | Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Portland Oregon | Full time | Remote
About us:
Our mission at Customer.io is to power automated communication that people like to receive. Today over 1,500 internet businesses use Customer.io to manage, send, and track performance of email, SMS, and push notifications. Unlike typical marketing platforms, Customer.io helps businesses increase relevance by using behavioral data: what people do or don’t do when logged in to a web or mobile app.
Role:
Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
https://boards.greenhouse.io/customerio/jobs/2226703