Attio + Customer.io: Sealing the deal on seamless, scalable messaging automation 

Attio is redefining customer relationship management with a next-generation CRM that combines robust automations, a flexible data model, and AI-powered scalability. As they launched their product and scaled their business, they needed marketing automation to keep pace. Customer.io’s flexible, scalable, and data-driven platform proved to be the perfect fit, empowering Attio to execute advanced messaging strategies with precision.

As Attio was gearing up for their initial product launch, they didn’t need much in the way of messaging tools: just a web form for people to sign up for the waitlist and a simple way to send periodic updates. MailChimp fit the bill just fine—until it didn’t.

As soon as Attio launched its product, its simple messaging infrastructure proved inadequate. With actual customer profile and product usage data flowing in, the team needed a way to support data-driven campaigns to onboard, nurture, and retain their growing customer base.

The pain points weren’t limited to marketing: sales, support, and even operational teams struggled with siloed information and a lack of visibility into the big picture. They found themselves constructing workflows in various siloed tools, none of which worked well together.

Key realization: Attio needed a marketing automation solution that mirrored how they thought about their customers and workspaces and would scale seamlessly with their growth.

A particularly pressing necessity was a tool that could effortlessly integrate with the core components of their tech stack: Intercom for customer support, Segment for synching data, and the Attio CRM itself for sales.

The team found their ideal match in Customer.io. The platform allowed them to integrate everything and build data-driven campaigns that addressed core marketing needs, as well as sales, success, and support.

Key Customer.io features that powered Attio’s success:

• Custom objects: Attio used objects to model their campaigns around how their business works.
• Webhooks: Webhooks create a symbiotic relationship between Attio’s CRM and Customer.io so the team can easily trigger workflows between the platforms.
• Relationship attribute: Attio knows how crucial it is to differentiate messaging based on a customer’s role. Using a relationship attribute in Customer.io for admins vs. members provided easy segmentation.
• Event triggers: By customizing campaigns based on people’s actions, Attio built timely, relevant messages—triggered directly from behavior on their website or within their platform.
• Segment integration: Attio uses Segment to sync all data into and out of their CRM. Customer.io’s native integration made bringing their data into Customer.io seamless.

Onboarding is Attio’s most critical, make-or-break moment in the customer journey. To stay engaged, customers need hyper-relevant messages based on their attributes and product usage.

Attio sends an onboarding email series when a customer first joins a workspace. However, people can be members of multiple workspaces, which introduces complexities to the onboarding process. The team needed to build a campaign that sent customers down the ideal path based on multiple factors, such as customer role, whether they’re members of other workspaces, and how thoroughly the new workspace has been developed.

Key realization: Attio identified the ah-ha moment that changed engagement, then crafted a multi-branch campaign to guide each customer down the right path to that point.

That ah-ha moment for Attio happens when a customer connects their email database to the Attio CRM, populating their workspace with contacts. The team found that one action more than doubles the chances of retaining a customer beyond 30 days, so it became the core of their onboarding strategy.

Attio leveraged multiple data points to power a sophisticated, multi-branch onboarding campaign each time a customer joined a workspace:

• Using a relationship attribute to identify whether the individual was a member or admin to personalize content by role.
• Having a single customer profile with historical usage data to customize the campaign based on previous actions in Attio.
• The ability to segment event data based on specific workspaces to drive customers to value if they are new to a workspace—or send them down a path toward deeper activation if they’ve already connected their email.

By combining all that data, the team was able to model multiple onboarding flows and tailor the customer journey with a sophisticated, personalized campaign.

Attio’s product-led growth strategy involves getting people to sign up for a free trial and quickly get value from it. So, their website focuses on driving visitors toward that goal: sign up now and dive right into the product. But they were running into a hitch with mobile traffic.

Like most CRMs, Attio is built for use on a computer; the product doesn’t translate well to mobile devices. However, 20% of the traffic to their marketing website was on mobile, and when those people signed up for a trial, they had a poor experience with the product.

Key realization: Attio recognized that mobile visitors to their marketing site needed a more engaging pathway, so they built a new workflow to deliver a context-aware experience.

Now, when people visit the marketing site on a mobile device, they’re invited to sign up to receive a demo video instead of going straight into a free trial.

That demo sign-up triggers a Customer.io campaign: people receive an email with a link to a demo video, which they can easily come back to on their desktop when they’re ready to take action.

While adding an additional step before someone converts may seem counterintuitive, Attio’s strategy has been enormously successful because it’s responsive to each individual’s context. The campaign has produced a 20-30% conversion rate by proactively nudging mobile visitors to engage on desktop devices—where they’ll get the ideal product experience—before starting their free trial.

Re-imagining the mobile experience also unlocked new opportunities for Attio’s paid ad strategy. In the past, they’d completely blocked out mobile from their ad campaigns because any conversions would just bring leads to a subpar product experience. But now they’ve opened a considerable portion of their ad spending to mobile because they know they’re sending people into a highly converting messaging campaign.

As Attio grew, they uncovered more ways to use Customer.io to improve their messaging strategy and operational efficiency. One of the most impactful approaches was a change in how they handled billing renewals. It was a long-standing pain point that the team solved with a simple yet powerful campaign.

In the past, the finance team had to check with the customer success team to find out which workspaces were coming up for renewal and then manually send billing renewal reminders each month. The lack of visibility meant that those emails were often going to the wrong customer roles—and sometimes landing after the actual renewal date. Not only was the process tremendously inefficient, but it also led to customer confusion and increased load for their support team.

Key realization: Attio needed to automate the billing renewal reminder process and ensure the right customers received a message at the right time.

By connecting the Attio CRM with Customer.io, the team finally had the data necessary to improve and automate the process. They leveraged workspace and relationship attributes to build a dynamic segment in Customer.io. The automated campaign targeted admins with an email 30 days before their annual renewal.

It was all powered by a sophisticated segment.

A simple automation.

A clear email message.

The result: an 80% renewal rate, and a radical improvement in operational efficiency to boot.

Attio’s success with their billing renewal process inspired them to uncover more and more ways to leverage their CRM and Customer.io together for improved messaging and operations.

Attio recognized a central correspondence between their product and Customer.io: flexibility. Both tools make it easy for customers to build incredibly powerful workflows tailored to business needs without requiring a budget for an on-staff product expert or an expensive contractor to seize that potential.

Key realization: Customer.io allowed Attio to model how their business worked in the platform—unlocking better collaboration and democratizing who could own campaigns.

Because the two platforms work so well together, it enables teams to work better together too. With this insight in mind, Attio made sure everyone could leverage Customer.io to proactively create great experiences for their customers.

Customer.io is built to unify and activate data across every part of a company’s tech stack. For Attio, the seamless connection between their product and Customer.io empowers messaging automation that delivers on their own brand promise: flexible, scalable automation to drive meaningful customer relationships. As Attio evolves from startup phase to growth-stage success, Customer.io scales right along with their success.

Put the power of data-driven automation to work for you with a free 14-day trial of Customer.io.