Customer.io introduces custom objects
A new way to organize your customer data
Background
Many Customer.io users wanted a more flexible way to model their data and personalize messaging around how customers interact with their business. SaaS companies needed account-level messaging, marketplaces needed relationship-based targeting, and fintech and healthcare teams needed ways to personalize communications around shared objects and entities.
The Solution
To address customer needs, Customer.io introduced custom objects in Journeys, expanding the platform beyond people-centric data models and enabling relationship-based personalization at scale. Now, Custom Objects allow companies to model relational data directly inside Customer.io. Instead of relying solely on profile attributes or events, teams can create reusable objects — like Accounts, Courses, Appointments, Events, or Properties — and associate people with them
The Strategy
The launch focused on helping marketers and developers understand both the concept of objects and how to actually implement them in a way that enhances their marketing automation campaigns. I handled the full and complete GTM roll-out, not only by collaborating with various stakeholders internally (PMM, growth, demand, product, engineering, success/support) but developed the content strategy for proving the value of this powerful new feature.
Introduction to custom objects in Customer.io
To help land the message with two different audiences (marketers and developers), I created separate educational tracks
For marketers, we had to do a little more heavy lifting around the why and the what of custom objects. But for devs, an already-tech-y audience, it was important not to come off as pandering to a group of people who admittedly probably knew more about objects and the shape of object data than me.
See a couple example articles here:
Teasers below:
And the educational journey continues! Use cases, docs, social, and much more!
From working with the product team to develop use case video guides, sample data sets and updates to our compete content, to collaborating with our docs team on a robust help center overview and ensuring our social game was on point, the roll-out of custom objects was focused on helping people understand their customer data, and start leveraging it in a way that helps their business grow.
