Customer.io

Customer.io user synchronization integration

Customer.io is a customer messaging platform for sending automated, behavior-based emails and other messages. The Post Affiliate Pro plugin connects it to your affiliate program, so every affiliate you approve is added to Customer.io as a customer without any manual export or import.

The plugin works at one moment in an affiliate’s life:

• Approved for the first time: a customer is created in Customer.io, identified by the affiliate’s email address, together with the details you chose to send.

NOTE: The synchronization runs one way, from Post Affiliate Pro to Customer.io, and only once per affiliate. Later edits or deletions of the affiliate are not sent, and customers that exist only in Customer.io are not turned into affiliates.

How to integrate Post Affiliate Pro with Customer.io

Get your Customer.io credentials

Log in to your Customer.io account and navigate to Settings > Account Settings > API Credentials. Copy your Site ID and API key, you will need both in the next step.

Activate the plugin

In your merchant panel navigate to Configuration > Plugins > Customer.IO user synchronization > Activate. Then fill in the configuration:

• Site ID: the Site ID from Customer.io.
• API Key: the API key from Customer.io.
• Attribute fields: below the credentials you will find one field for each affiliate detail, for example Affiliate ID, first name, last name, or your own signup form fields. Enter the name of the Customer.io attribute the value should be saved into. Leave a field empty if you do not want to send it.

Save the configuration. The plugin then connects to Customer.io and loads the correct server address for your account automatically. If the connection works, you will see a confirmation message, and if not, the message tells you what went wrong, so you can correct the Site ID or API key and save again.

Choose which details to send

The affiliate’s email address and the time of creation are always sent. Everything else is up to you. A typical setup maps the first name and last name to the attributes you already use in your Customer.io messages, plus the Affiliate ID, so you can personalize emails and find the customer again later. Use attribute names exactly as they are written in Customer.io, because the plugin sends the name you type.

Test the integration

Approve a test affiliate and check that the customer appears in Customer.io with the attributes you mapped. If it does not, check the logs in your merchant panel, the plugin writes what it sends and any error it receives there.

How does the plugin work exactly?

When an affiliate is approved for the first time, either by you or automatically under your affiliate approval settings, the plugin:

1. Prepares the data: the email address, the creation time, and every affiliate detail you mapped to a Customer.io attribute.
2. Sends it to Customer.io using your Site ID and API key, with the email address as the customer identifier.
3. Writes the result to the log. If Customer.io is unreachable or rejects the request, the error is logged and the approval itself is not affected.

The plugin only reacts to the first approval of an affiliate, so nothing is sent when the affiliate is edited or deleted later.

Use case: onboarding new affiliates automatically

Say you run a SaaS affiliate program and approve a few new affiliates every week. Without the integration, someone has to add each approved affiliate to Customer.io by hand before the welcome messages can start, and some always get missed.

With the plugin activated, every approved affiliate arrives in Customer.io on its own, with their name and Affiliate ID already filled in. You can then build a Customer.io campaign for new affiliates: a welcome message, a walkthrough of your marketing materials, and a reminder to grab their first affiliate link. Because the Affiliate ID is saved as an attribute, you can also reference it in messages or use it to match customers with records in Post Affiliate Pro.

Use Customer.io for this kind of nurturing, and keep the email templates built into Post Affiliate Pro for transactional messages such as commission and payout notices.

What is Customer.io?

Customer.io is a platform for creating personalized, automated customer journeys across email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app messaging. It was founded in 2012 by Colin Nederkoorn and stores customers together with their attributes, so that messages can be based on what people do and who they are.

For affiliate managers, this means you can treat affiliates as their own audience. You can build a segment of new affiliates, send each group the right content, and personalize every message with the attributes the plugin saved.

Key features of Customer.io

• Journeys and automated campaigns: build message flows that start from a trigger, such as a new customer being created.
• Segmentation and audiences: group customers by their attributes and behavior and send each group its own messages.
• Multiple channels: reach customers by email, push notification, SMS, and in-app messages from one place.
• Design Studio: create and edit the messages themselves.
• Analytics: review how your messages and campaigns perform.
• Data integrations and API: connect Customer.io to your other tools and send it data through its API, which is how Post Affiliate Pro adds your affiliates.
• Lifecycle messaging: Customer.io highlights onboarding and welcome flows, activation, and retention as typical uses, and the first of these fits new affiliates well.

Customer.io pricing options

Customer.io prices its plans mainly by the number of profiles (people) you store. At the time of writing, its pricing page lists:

• Essentials: from $100 per month billed monthly, including 5,000 profiles.
• Premium: from $1,000 per month billed yearly.
• Enterprise: custom pricing.

There is no permanent free plan, but you can start a trial, and early-stage companies that have raised under $10M can apply to a Startup Program that offers a full year free. Prices change, so check the current numbers on the Customer.io pricing page before you decide.

Alternatives to Customer.io

If Customer.io does not fit your needs, these are common alternatives for automated customer messaging:

• Braze
• Iterable
• Klaviyo
• Brevo
• ActiveCampaign , which also has a Post Affiliate Pro integration
• Mailchimp , which also has a Post Affiliate Pro integration

Other email marketing integrations

Post Affiliate Pro also integrates with other email marketing tools. See the ActiveCampaign , AWeber , and MailChimp user synchronization guides, or browse all integrations .