Rachel HaneyGreat question. The impetus that is actually moving this forward is incident comms (being able to proactively alert in-app if there are issues). We have a status page but customers don't feel it's proactive or informative enough.
From a Marketing perspective, we know our in-app promotions (webinars/events, content, awards, etc.) perform really well. There's also a strong interest to be able to do surveying/feedback (not necessarily NPS, more like custom questions for data reports we put together).
From my perspective, if I can get those things at a small price point, that's good enough for now and I might be able to get budget from Marketing without having to involve Product (who pays for Pendo where it does exist).
That said, my role is shifting toward lifecycle, and in my dream world we would be using these in-app for onboarding, education/adoption, targeted cross-sell/upsell, etc.
I'm not sure what the pricing is like for customer.io, but if it's not horrendous I feel like I may eventually be able to make a case for it. (Though we already have Hubspot and I'm not sure if these would be seen as redundant?) Our new CMO seems to be much more invested in customer marketing. Traditionally, we basically just communicate to prospects and customers the same, and we have a pretty terrible database so we can't really communicate to customers directly via email (hence the real need for in-app).
