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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, you’ll make the most of Customer.io when you integrate with us.

For example, imagine that you want to message people who added products to their carts and haven’t finished their purchases. You could go to your sales platform, export a list of users who haven’t finished a purchase, upload it to Customer.io, and then start a campaign. But that’s a tedious process you’d have to regularly repeat whenever you want to encourage people to complete their purchase.

You can automate this whole process by integrating with Customer.io! Following this same example, you could send an event to Customer.io when people add items to their carts, triggering reminders if they don’t complete their purchases within a certain amount of time.

Data replay prevents vendor lock-in

Sometimes you might feel that you can’t move from one service to another because of historical data—you don’t want to lose data that you’ve stored in a particular service, and it may not be easy to export that data to a new service.

Customer.io ensures that you aren’t locked into past vendors with our Data Replay feature.

When you send data into Customer.io from most integrations, we store it indefinitely. If you’re on a premium or enterprise plan, you can resend your historical data to new integrations. This means that when you want to move from one service to another, you can add a new integration and replay your historical data to the new destination. That way, every new integration you set up has access to all of your historical data, and you can use the services that best fit your business.

flowchart LR a(website)-->|real time
data|c b(server-side integration)-->|real time
data|c subgraph c [Customer.io] direction LR z(real time data) y(historical data) end z-.-x|disconnect old
integration|d(old integration) z-->|connect real time
integration|e(new integration) y-->|replay old data|e

Integrations are directional

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

  • Data InAn integration that feeds data into Customer.io. integrations help you feed data into Customer.io.
  • Data OutAn integration that sends data out of Customer.io. 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!

Data in

When you set up a data-in integration, you’ll install one of our source libraries and use that to send data to Customer.io. Then you can route that data to one or more destinations. Today we support the following types of data-in integrations:

  • JavaScript: In general, you’ll want to install our JavaScript library in your website(s). It’s one of the easiest ways to feed data into Customer.io and it supports in-app messages for your website visitors.
  • Mobile SDKs: let you send data to Customer.io from your mobile app and support push and in-app notifications!
  • Server-side libraries (NodeJS, Python, Go) help you send data directly from servers when you can’t gather data from your client.
  • Reverse ETL integrations (Amazon RedShift, Snowflake, etc) help you feed data into Customer.io directly from your database.

Check out our integrations directory to see the complete suite of data-in 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.

We have a whole catalog of integrations for your data. Check it out!

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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