Contra <💌> Customer.io Integration

At Contra we move super quickly and pump out new features almost every day. Our email and in-app messaging needs started to become more and more complex and we found ourselves spending a lot of time building out custom scheduling and logic. In order to focus on our core business we decided to leverage Customer.io for all of our messaging needs.

We've been experimenting with a new methodology at Contra called "GSD" (Get shit done!) where we take an employee and completely remove them from their day to day work and allow 100% focus on the task at hand. I was one of the first guinea pigs for this and my task was to migrate all email systems over to Customer.io in 4 days 🙀.

It's mind blowing what I was able to accomplish in 4 days! First thing was to make sure we had all of our user data into Customer.io and that was an absolute breeze. A few clicks and we had all of our analytics events flowing in via the Segment integration. Then it was just a simple CSV upload to backfill existing users. Next was making some backend tweaks to use Customer.io's Node.js SDK to deliver the emails. Again, super simple change.

Then we had all emails flowing through Customer.io and it was super cool to see everything that came to life in the admin panel. You can see all events, emails, attribute changes for any user. You can also view the exact same email a user saw which is a great help when debugging.

The last thing was to take advantage of Customer.io Campaigns. These are very easy to use workflow builders for building any messaging workflow. On the backend we just have to make sure some high level hooks are in place, and our product team is fully empowered to build out any logic for delivering messages. We've eliminated a whole step in the process where product team requires engineering to make email logic changes, super cool!

10/10, would integrate again! 💌