Summary
Customer.io is a platform used to automate and keep track of email campaigns across your business. Avenue integrates with their Transactional API to automate sending event-based transactional emails to customers.
Getting Started
If you don't already have one, create a Customer.io account here.
Once you've created your account, you'll need to create an API key.
Click on Workspace Settings in the Customer.io sidebar.
Click on API Credentials under the Advance Settings section
Click on the App API Keys tab and create a new App API Key
For more information on this process, see the Customer.io API Credentials docs.
Once you have your API key, go to the Settings Page in Avenue and scroll to the bottom of the page and select the "customer.io" card.
From here, click on the Customer.io button in the Integrations section. You'll be prompted to enter your App API Key from the previous step. Enter the API key and click Set API Key. If you see see the Customer.io button turn green, your integration was successful 🎉!
Creating a Customer.io Email Layout
Before you can get starting triggering transactional emails with Avenue, you need to set up a transactional email layout in Customer.io. Click on the Transactional section in the Customer.io sidebar and follow the prompts to create your first layout. Feel free to refer to their transactional message docs or their email layout docs if you find yourself needing some help!
Triggering a Customer.io Email from an Avenue Monitor
Now that your integration is successfully set up, and you've created a Customer.io transactional email layout, you're ready to configure an Avenue monitor to trigger an email with that layout! Navigate to the Create Monitor Page and after you've filled out the first few sections of the form, scroll down to the Notifications section. Select Customer.io as the notification type. From here you can fill in the fields required to hit the Customer.io Transactional API. See their list of supported fields to get an idea of the different things you can configure here.
To start, you can:
Set the to field to either a static value, like "[email protected]", or a dynamic value from one of your query columns, like "{{customer_email}}".
Set the transactional_message_id field to the ID of the transactional email template that you created earlier.
Set the id field in the identifiers field to a unique value used to identify the customer you are emailing. This can be the ID you store for the customer in your database!
Set some message_data if your Customer.io email layout has templated values in it. In the example above, we'd replace the customer_name value with the customer name stored in our database!
Once you're finished filling out this section, you're ready to test your monitor and see what the email looks like! Temporarily set the to field to your own email address, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Test Monitor. You should shortly receive an email from Customer.io using your email layout and containing the data from your query! Happy alerting!