perspectives

Customer.io: Customer Engagement Platform Powering Lifecycle Marketing

March 2022

By Pete Jensen, Matt Neidlinger, Jeremy Tepper

Customer.io Customer Engagement Platform

We’re excited to announce our investment in Customer.io, the leading customer engagement platform for growing businesses. Our investment continues the thread of Spectrum’s work in and around the marketing automation category, starting with our investment in Litmus back in 2015. We’ve known Customer.io’s CEO Colin Nederkoorn and followed the company’s journey since 2016 and are thrilled to be able to welcome them to the Spectrum family.

Changes in Data Privacy and User Behavior Require New Solutions for Engaging with Customers

Over the past few years, several macro trends have dramatically shifted the ways in which companies engage with prospects and customers. Changes in data privacy laws have increased the importance of first-party user data in determining how and when to communicate with users. In concert, a rising tide of “product-led” businesses that use their product as the primary means of driving growth has necessitated the evolution of marketing across the entire customer lifecycle, from messaging at initial acquisition, to onboarding, nurturing and educating, to expanding and retaining. Lastly, companies must now meet their users on a range of channels, whether through SMS / text, mobile push, in-app, over email, or otherwise. As a result, the toolset required to drive prospect and customer engagement in a personalized, automated way, across multiple channels, and throughout a customer’s lifecycle, has had to evolve.

Customer.io, a Customer Engagement Platform

Customer.io was founded with the aim of enabling any business to automate marketing campaigns using behavioral data generated through user interaction with web or mobile apps. Businesses send their user engagement data in real-time to Customer.io, which ingests, normalizes, and makes actionable that information at scale. Businesses then use the platform to design what can be complex, multi-threaded and automated messaging flows via Customer.io’s low/no-code campaign builder. These communication flows are then made highly personalized using granular user segments created in Customer.io and informed by that original, first-party data. As users engage with the app, messages are automatically triggered in real-time and delivered across the intended channels.

Executing these omnichannel marketing campaigns in an automated way, at scale, and in real-time is fundamentally hard. Customer.io is capable of ingesting and processing terabytes of data per customer and can organize that information such that it is actionable in real-time. And the stakes are high –operating as the core engine of the communications stack, Customer.io is mission-critical to how businesses engage with their customers. It must be a 24/7, ‘always-on’ product.

While Customer.io’s feature set is enterprise-grade, the company enables access to its product in a way that’s decidedly un-enterprise-like. Their highly flexible contracting and affordable pricing contrasts with the multi-year commitments and high contract minimums of up-market-focused platforms. The vast majority of Customer.io’s customers find the company organically and sign up via self-serve with the swipe of a credit card, whereas competitors sell top-down via traditional enterprise sales with long sales cycles and limited product access. As a result, companies in over 100 countries across myriad industries, and with user bases ranging from tens of thousands to tens of millions, have found Customer.io and chosen the platform to power their prospect and customer communications.

C.IO’s Unique Path

Customer.io has charted its own path, thoughtfully balancing growth and capital efficiency on its way to tens of millions in revenue across thousands of customers, all while having raised less than $10 million of institutional capital along the way.

As a product-first company, Customer.io has consistently demonstrated a rapid pace of product innovation and development. That spirit, coupled with the company’s culture of deep customer empathy and service has led to high NPS, long customer lifespans, and expanding revenue per customer over time. We’re incredibly excited to join Colin and the entire Customer.io team as they continue building an enduring, category-leading customer engagement platform for today’s marketers. If you’re interested in joining on this mission, we encourage you to connect here.

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