Understanding Integrations in Customer.io

Updated

We make it easy to connect data from sources to destinations—including Journeys—so that you can take advantage of your data, no matter where it comes from or where you want it to go.

Why integrate with Customer.io?

While you can add people manually, upload CSV files, and get data into and out of Customer.io other ways, integrating with Customer.io unlocks the ability to respond to your audiences in near real-time.

For example, imagine that you want to remind people to complete their purchases when they abandon their carts. Integrating with Customer.io makes this easy: your integration sends events to Customer.io when people add items to their carts, which you can then use to send messages to your audience if they don’t complete their purchases within a certain amount of time.

If you don’t integrate with Customer.io, you’d need to go to your sales platform, export a list of users who haven’t finished a purchase, and upload it to Customer.io. And you’d need to repeat this process every time you want to encourage people to finish their purchases, which is obviously a tedious process that doesn’t scale with your business.

Integrations unlock automated, personalized communications with your audience so you can engage people at scale.

Integrations are directional

When you look at our integrations directory, you’ll see that we offer two major categories of integrations:

  • Data In integrations help you feed data into Customer.io.
  • Data Out integrations help you send data to all the places where you want to activate or use your data. You can send your incoming data downstream to as many services as you want. This means you can use Customer.io as a Customer Data Platform (CDP) in addition to your messaging needs!
flowchart LR subgraph Data-in direction LR a(Website) b(Mobile App) c(Database) end d((Customer.io)) a-->d b-->d c-->d subgraph Data-out direction LR e(CRM) f(Data Warehouse) g(Analytics Provider) end d-.->e d-.->f d-.->g

Data in

To get started with Customer.io, you’ll want to send data into your workspace from your data sources so you can automate communications with your audience.

Check out our integrations directory to see “data source” integrations.

Data out

Unlike data in integrations, you don’t need to install anything to send data out to another service. You’ll set up a data-out integration in Customer.io, typically with credentials for your destination service, and we’ll send your data downstream.

This lets you send data to Customer.io and downstream to other services. This makes Customer.io easy to fit into your existing stack, and lets you use your engagement data to enrich data in downstream services.

We have a whole catalog of outbound integrations. Check it out!

Understanding our APIs

«««< Updated upstream Customer.io offers two main APIs that serve different purposes:

Customer.io offers three APIs; two for data in and one for data out.

Stashed changes

  • Pipelines API: This is our primary data ingestion API, designed for sending customer data, events, and managing people in your workspace. Most of our SDKs and libraries are built around the Pipelines API, making it the go-to choice for feeding data into Customer.io.

  • App API: This API focuses on fetching data and managing your Customer.io workspace configuration. Use the App API when you need to retrieve information about your campaigns, segments, or other workspace data.

The key difference is direction: the Pipelines API is optimized for sending data to Customer.io, while the App API is designed for getting data from Customer.io. When choosing an integration approach, consider whether you’re primarily sending data (use Pipelines API or our SDKs) or retrieving data (use App API).

Data Residency: US and EU regions

We offer US and EU regions. While your region accounts for the location of the data you keep in Customer.io, it doesn’t account for your integrations. For example, you could be in our EU region but send data to a downstream service in the US, and vice versa.

Some of the services we integrate with, like Mixpanel, have regional settings that you can configure to make sure that your data stays in the region you want it to. When you set up a data out integration, make sure the service you integrate with stores data in the right region for you!

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