Bundling CDP and Messaging
Colin Nederkoorn, founder & CEO at Customer.io, on the CDP layer in messaging
Pointing prospects to Segment let Customer.io sell a technically demanding product without asking buyers to make an all or nothing bet. A startup could wire its app events into Segment once, send those events into Customer.io for onboarding and lifecycle messaging, and know that if the tool disappointed, the same event stream could be redirected elsewhere. That reduced perceived integration risk at the exact moment Customer.io was still early and unproven.
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This only worked because Customer.io sat above the data layer. The product turns app events and user attributes into segments and branching campaigns, and it could ingest that data either directly or through a CDP like Segment or Hull. Segment handled the plumbing, Customer.io handled the messaging logic.
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The tradeoff was weaker lock in. Prior research and customer interviews show that when data already flows through Segment, switching email platforms becomes much easier because the event pipeline stays in place and another vendor can rebuild campaigns and segments on top of it.
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That dynamic changed as Segment moved upmarket and added paid plans. Customer.io's core base was SMBs and startups, with 80% of customers spending under $1K per month in 2021, so once a separate CDP bill started to exceed the messaging bill, many teams chose direct integrations or wanted the CDP bundled into the messaging product itself.
This pushes messaging vendors to absorb more of the data layer themselves. The winners are likely to be platforms that keep the flexibility of event based messaging, but remove the extra vendor and extra bill, which is exactly why bundling CDP and messaging has become a central product move in this market.