This page is part of the Customer.io documentation. For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt.

10

Quick start guide

Welcome to Customer.io! While the platform offers plenty of features and options, this guide provides a basic setup path to get you started quickly and demonstrate some of the things you can do with Customer.io. You’ll create a workspace, import at least one profile, and set up your messaging channels!

Get started

This guide is designed to walk you through the most common parts of the setup path and introduce you to the major parts of our platform. When you start setting up Customer.io, we provide you with a Setup List on your Workspace’s Dashboard. You don’t have to do everything on the list, but you must do the following things before you can really take advantage of Customer.io:

1. Create an account and a workspace.
2. Set up the types of messages you want to send. On this page, we’ll set up email.
3. Add profiles to your workspace. As a part of this guide, you’ll add yourself as a test profile.
4. Start sending messages!

In this guide, you’ll add a test profile and send it a message, demonstrating how you’ll use your data to automate and personalize messages.

Create your workspace

After you create your account, you’ll make a workspace. You can think of a workspace as a container for your profiles, data, messages, etc. You can have more than one workspace, but, in general, you won’t share information across workspaces.

In general, we encourage you to use the default settings. They support most use cases and you can change them later!

Set up your email channel

You can set up and send messages over different channels, but email is our most common—and one of the easiest to set up.

Before you can send messages, you need to configure the types of messages you want to send: email, push, in-app, SMS, or Slack. You can start with just one channel and add new ones later by going to Settings > Workspace Settings and clicking Get Started on the channel(s) you want to add.

1. Enter your domain—like example.com.

   

   
2. Enter your From address(es). These are the addresses that your messages will come from.

   

   
3. Verify and authenticate your domain(s). This involves adding some records to your domain host.
4. (Recommended) Set up link tracking so you can record the links that profiles click in your messages. This involves adding a CNAME record to your domain host(s).

Add a test profile to your workspace

To get started quickly, you can go to the Profiles page in your workspace and add a profile with a few attributes to test with.

In this case, you might want to add yourself to your workspace, so you can test an automation against yourself and get a feel for Customer.io without inadvertently messaging your customers or users. Later in this guide, we’ll use your test profile in a live segment and automation.

1. Go to the Profiles page, click Add Profiles and select Add a Profile.
2. Set your ID and email address. To make it easy, you might assign your test user an ID of 1.
3. Add first_name and last_name attributesA key-value pair that you associate with a person or an object—like a person’s name, the date they were created in your workspace, or a company’s billing date etc. Use attributes to target people and personalize messages. to your profile. These are the values you’ll use to target your test profile and personalize messages! You can add as many other attributes as you want, and we’ll show you how to take advantage of them later on this page.
4. Click Save Changes when you’re done.

What is a profile in Customer.io?

It might help to understand what we mean by a “profile”. In Customer.io, you’ll represent people with data, the most important three data points being identifiers, attributes, and events. We represent the people who visit your website, your app, or otherwise interact with your service as profiles.

• IdentifiersThe attributes you use to add, modify, and target people. Each unique identifier value represents an individual person in your workspace.: the values that make profiles unique in your system—like a database id, email address, or phone number.
• AttributesA key-value pair that you associate with a person or an object—like a person’s name, the date they were created in your workspace, or a company’s billing date etc. Use attributes to target people and personalize messages.: the things you know about profiles, like their names, interests, etc.
• EventsSomething that a person in your workspace did. Events can trigger automations, add people to segments, etc, and you can use properties from events to personalize messages.: the things that profiles do. You can use events to trigger automations in response to your audience’s activity in your system.

You can associate other data with profiles, like their relationships to objectsAn object is a non-person entity that you can associate with one or more people—like a company, account, or online course. (e.g. companies, accounts, etc) and their mobile devices, but the three things you’ll work with most often are identifiers, attributes, and events.

Create an automation and send your profile a message

Now that you’ve added a profile and set up a message channel, you can set up an automation to send your profile a message.

1. Go to Automations in the left-hand menu, then click Create Automation.

   

   
2. Click the pencil icon next to the automation name in the top left to change the name of the automation so your team members can easily find it on the automations page.

   

   

Set your trigger

1. Click the trigger block on the canvas, and choose Segment change as your trigger type. Triggers determine who enters your automation and when. In this example, profiles will trigger your automation when they join a segment.

   

   
2. Click the segments dropdown then choose Create a new data-driven segment.

   

   
3. Click Add condition or group. Select Attribute, choose first_name from the profile attribute dropdown, and set your test profile’s first name. If you have multiple profiles with this first_name, choose another attribute so real members of your audience don’t enter this test automation!

   

   
4. Add a Name for your segment. You can filter by this on the  Segments page.

   

   
5. Click Create segment.
6. Click Save and build workflow.

Create your workflow

1. Click Add to see a menu of actions. Drag an Email onto the canvas.

   

   
2. Click the email to edit the name then click Add Content.

   

   
3. Pick one of the editors. In most demonstrations, we use the drag-and-drop editor to send stylized messages that resonate with your audience. But, for this example, we’re using the rich text editor because it’s easier to show off the personalization features of Customer.io.

   

   
4. In the From field, choose one of the Sender addresses you added when you set up email as a message channel.

   

   
5. Add a subject line.
6. Create your email. We added liquidA syntax that supports variables, letting you personalize messages for your audience. For example, if you want to reference a person’s first name, you might use the variable {{customer.first_name}}. to personalize the message with your test profile’s first name. You can use {{customer.<attribute_name>}} to reference any attribute value associated with your audience. You can also create conditions and set fallbacks when attributes don’t exist.
7. Click Save at the bottom then Back to Workflow at the top.
8. Click Settings. Under Sending Behavior, note that this message is set to “Queue Draft.” This means after the automation is live, we would draft this email, but not send it to your audience. Update this to “Send automatically” then save your changes.

   

   

Review your automation

1. Click Review 1 item next to Start Automation. Notice you still have to set a goal.

   

   
2. Click Set Goal. Since this is a test automation, we’ll choose “No goal.” Then click Save changes.

   

   Notice you can also change message settings - like subscription preference and message limits - and exit conditions from this panel. By default with segment-triggered automations, profiles exit early when they don’t match your trigger or filter criteria - in this case, when their first name changes.
3. Click Start Automation to review your automation. Under Trigger, choose who you want your automation to include: existing matches (profiles already stored in your workspace) and/or future additions. We’re using Current profiles and future additions so our existing test profile enters the automation.

   

   
4. Click Start Automation.

Within a minute, you should get your first email!

This was quick. Is it really that easy?

This guide walks you through the most common parts of Customer.io so you can start sending messages as quickly as possible. But it’s not comprehensive. You’ll get the most out of Customer.io when you carefully plan your implementation, capture the right data, and automate your messaging strategy.

That all takes time.

So, while we can get you started in just a few minutes, and demonstrate some common features of Customer.io, it’ll take more than this quick start to get you over the finish line!