How Monarch Money Boosted Engagement with Customer.io 

Monarch Money helps people manage their finances through intuitive budgeting and financial planning tools. However, the company's onboarding experience didn’t reflect the sophistication of its product.

When Sue Cho joined as Head of Lifecycle Marketing, she saw an opportunity to shift from generic drip flow to personalized, behavior-triggered messaging. And after 16 years in email marketing, Sue has used nearly every platform on the market. But Customer.io stood out as a way to harness real-time user data and create an onboarding experience that encouraged users to take the next step.

Monarch’s original onboarding flow followed a common pattern: a time-based sequence of four generic emails sent over the course of a trial. But these emails weren’t driving results, and in some cases, they led to the end of a customer journey.

Sue’s goal was to build a smarter, data-driven onboarding journey that would guide users through Monarch's core values without overwhelming them.

With Customer.io’s flexible data handling and intuitive workflow builder, Monarch Money reimagined its onboarding experience from the ground up.

They mapped out key actions users should take during trial—like connecting a bank account or updating transaction categories—and created triggered emails based on in-app behavior. These messages delivered a single, timely nudge to help users progress, rather than a flood of static content.

A critical integration with Segment allowed product usage data to flow into Customer.io (http://customer.io) to customize their onboarding experience, and another integration with Snowflake allowed the product usage data and the customer engagement data from the Customer.io-based campaigns to be stored in their data warehouse.

The team also used Customer.io’s built-in holdout testing to validate the impact of their new approach.

The new personalized onboarding flow had a measurable impact across key engagement and retention metrics. Understanding the key customer moments that led to product adoption and feature engagement allowed the Monarch team to focus their onboarding messages and drive product adoption based on in-app behavior for new customers. The new onboarding experience drove impact by producing:

• 3.36% drop in trial cancellations, meaning customers found value in the product during the trial period and converted to paying customers.
• 4.4% lift in reports page views, which meant Monarch customers were tracking their financials in Monarch’s product, a key driver of product adoption.
• 2.5% lift in users updating categories, a critical product engagement action, especially for new customers.

These improvements confirmed what Monarch suspected: when onboarding meets users where they are, engagement goes up, and cancellations go down.

Monarch didn’t stop with email. When they revamped their referral program, they used Customer.io to test in-app messages targeted at new trial users who had just connected their accounts.

The result? A 200% increase in referrals within one week.

With Customer.io powering both email and in-app, Monarch built a connected lifecycle experience that responded to user behavior in real time.

Monarch is continuing to deepen its lifecycle strategy with plans to introduce push notifications and SMS, migrate transactional alerts from SendGrid to Customer.io, and develop cohort-specific onboarding paths based on product usage data.

Monarch Money’s success shows what’s possible when lifecycle marketing is powered by real-time data, thoughtful strategy, and flexible tools.

With Customer.io, you can too. Discover how we can help you create personalized experiences that drive real results.