How Vibe.co runs a sophisticated email program with a small team 

Vibe.co is the streaming TV platform built for performance marketers. Their all-in-one solution combines hyper-targeted audience segmentation, AI-powered campaign optimization, and incrementality measurement, giving brands the precision and transparency they expect from social and search, on TV. Trusted by 10,000+ brands, their marketing team runs lean by design. Customer.io is a big part of how they make it work.

Before Customer.io, Vibe.co used Mailchimp. They were also already running Segment, but the two weren’t talking to each other.

For a product like Vibe, where user behavior inside the platform tells you almost everything you need to know about what a customer needs next, that disconnect was a real problem. Emails went out without any connection to what users had actually done. Onboarding existed in name only. "We tried," says Romain Marsal, VP of Growth and Marketing, and Customer.io's main contact at Vibe, "but it was a mess."

The team discovered Customer.io through the Segment marketplace, specifically because of how cleanly it integrated with Segment. That was the decision, made in January 2023 when Vibe was still between seed and Series A, and they haven't looked back.

One of the first things Vibe built in Customer.io was a proper onboarding journey: a seven-day automated email sequence triggered when a new user signs up. Before this, there was no structured onboarding at all. Now, this process is fully automated. The entire flow was live in two days.

The results backed it up. Activation rates improved from 13-15% before the onboarding journey launched, to 19-25% after.

The onboarding journey is just one piece. Vibe also runs weekly newsletters via the broadcast feature, covering product updates, webinar invitations, and platform news. Julia Hartmann, Marketing & Events Manager at Vibe, manages these consistently, every week, to keep the audience engaged and informed. Automated platform action campaigns handle payment failure notifications, campaign expiration warnings, and recommendation emails triggered by platform events. And behavior-based campaigns, built on the Segment event data Romain manages, let the team personalize based on actual user actions and customer typology rather than demographics alone.

When Vibe adds a new integration or has something worth saying, Senda Ben Abdallah, Head of Product Marketing, can update the onboarding sequence, Julia can refresh the design, and it goes live. No engineering sprint required.

Romain is direct about what Customer.io enables.

Three people with other jobs to do are running an email program that would stretch most dedicated lifecycle teams. Julia, who manages Design Studio for Vibe, handles all email design and template work. Senda, Vibe's Head of PMM, keeps the onboarding sequence updated when messaging changes. Romain handles the data and event layer. And Customer.io removes enough friction that a non-dedicated team can keep a sophisticated strategy running without compromise.

Julia rarely provides product feedback on the tools she uses. She made an exception for Design Studio. "I usually never provide any feedback," she says. "This is so cool that I'll do it." She flagged issues, the support team responded, and features she asked about showed up on the roadmap.

The team is already thinking about how to deepen their Customer.io footprint and bring more of their customer touchpoints under one roof. The reasoning is straightforward: the more coordinated the experience across channels, the better it is for customers.