Power automated communication that people like to receive.
A ruby client for the Customer.io Track API.
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'customerio'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself:
$ gem install customerio
It's helpful to know that everything below can also be accomplished through the Customer.io JavaScript snippet.
In many cases, using the JavaScript snippet will be easier to integrate with your app, but there are several reasons why using the API client is useful:
- You're not planning on triggering emails based on how customers interact with your website (e.g. users who haven't visited the site in X days)
- You're using the javascript snippet, but have a few events you'd like to send from your backend system. They will work well together!
- You'd rather not have another javascript snippet slowing down your frontend. Our snippet is asynchronous (doesn't affect initial page load) and very small, but we understand.
In the end, the decision on whether or not to use the API client or the JavaScript snippet should be based on what works best for you. You'll be able to integrate fully with Customer.io with either approach.
Create an instance of the client with your Customer.io credentials.
If you're using Rails, create an initializer config/initializers/customerio.rb
:
$customerio = Customerio::Client.new("YOUR SITE ID", "YOUR API SECRET KEY", region: Customerio::Regions::US)
region
is optional and takes one of two values—US
or EU
. If you do not specify your region, we assume that your account is based in the US (US
). If your account is based in the EU and you do not provide the correct region (EU
), we'll route requests to our EU data centers accordingly, however this may cause data to be logged in the US.
Tracking data of logged in customers is a key part of Customer.io. In order to send triggered emails, we must know the email address of the customer. You can also specify any number of customer attributes which help tailor Customer.io to your business.
Attributes you specify are useful in several ways:
-
As customer variables in your triggered emails. For instance, if you specify the customer's name, you can personalize the triggered email by using it in the subject or body.
-
As a way to filter who should receive a triggered email. For instance, if you pass along the current subscription plan (free / basic / premium) for your customers, you can set up triggers which are only sent to customers who have subscribed to a particular plan (e.g. "premium").
You'll want to identify your customers when they sign up for your app and any time their key information changes. This keeps Customer.io up to date with your customer information.
# Arguments
# attributes (required) - a hash of information about the customer. You can pass any
# information that would be useful in your triggers. You
# must at least pass in an id, email, and created_at timestamp.
$customerio.identify(
:id => 5,
:email => "[email protected]",
:created_at => customer.created_at.to_i,
:first_name => "Bob",
:plan => "basic"
)
You can use the identify operation to update customers.
If you need to change the id
or email
identifiers for a customer,
you will need to pass in the cio_id
identifier.
cio_id
is a unique identifier set by Customer.io, used to reference a person,
and cannot be changed.
E.g.: if the customer created in the identify operation above was given the cio_id
of "f000000d"
, you could change its ID and email address using:
$customerio.identify(
:cio_id => "f000000d",
:id => 1005,
:email => "[email protected]"
)
This method requires either the id
or cio_id
for the person. It does not work with email addresses.
You can also use this method to make other updates to the person using the cio_id
.
If you need to identify a person using their email address, then you can do so
by passing in a customer ID to the identify
method. This allows you to specify
a customer ID that is different than the one used in the id
attribute. E.g.:
# Arguments
# customer_id (required) - the customer ID to use for this customer, may be an id, email address, or the cio_id.
# This will be used to construct the URL but not sent in the body attributes.
# attributes (required) - a hash of information about the customer. You can pass any
# information that would be useful in your triggers. You
# must at least pass in an id, email, and created_at timestamp.
$customerio.identify(
:customer_id => "[email protected]",
:location => "Australia"
)
Note:
- If you want to use the
cio_id
in thecustomer_id
field ofidentify_customer_id
, you will need to prefix it with"cio_"
. E.g.:"cio_f000000d"
for acio_id
off000000d
. - The
identify
method can identify the person using one ofcustomer_id
,cio_id
orid
. The order of precedence iscustomer_id
>cio_id
>id
.
Deleting a customer will remove them, and all their information from Customer.io. Note: if you're still sending data to Customer.io via other means (such as the javascript snippet), the customer could be recreated.
# Arguments
# customer_id (required) - a unique identifier for the customer. This
# should be the same id you'd pass into the
# `identify` command above.
$customerio.delete(5)
When you merge two people, you pick a primary person and merge a secondary, duplicate person into it. The primary person remains after the merge and the secondary is deleted. This process is permanent: you cannot recover the secondary person.
The first and third parameters represent the identifier for the primary and secondary people respectively—one of id
, email
, or cio_id
. The second and fourth parameters are the identifier values for the primary and secondary people respectively.
# $customerio.merge_customers("primaryType", "primaryIdentifier", "secondaryType", "secondaryIdentifier")
# primaryType / secondaryType are one of "id", "email", or "cio_id"
# primaryIdentifier / secondaryIdentifier are the identifier value corresponding to the type.
# merge customer "[email protected]" into "[email protected]"
$customerio.merge_customers("email", "[email protected]", "email", "[email protected]")
Now that you're identifying your customers with Customer.io, you can now send events like "purchased" or "watchedIntroVideo". These allow you to more specifically target your users with automated emails, and track conversions when you're sending automated emails to encourage your customers to perform an action.
# Arguments
# customer_id (required) - the id of the customer who you want to associate with the event.
# name (required) - the name of the event you want to track.
# attributes (optional) - any related information you'd like to attach to this
# event. These attributes can be used in your triggers to control who should
# receive the triggered email. You can set any number of data values.
$customerio.track(5, "purchase", :type => "socks", :price => "13.99")
Note: If you want to track events which occurred in the past, you can include a timestamp
attribute
(in seconds since the epoch), and we'll use that as the date the event occurred.
$customerio.track(5, "purchase", :type => "socks", :price => "13.99", :timestamp => 1365436200)
You can also send anonymous events, for situations where you don't yet have a customer record yet. An anonymous event requires an anonymous_id
representing the unknown person and an event name
. When you identify a person, you can set their anonymous_id
attribute. If event merging is turned on in your workspace, and the attribute matches the anonymous_id
in one or more events that were logged within the last 30 days, we associate those events with the person.
Anonymous events cannot trigger campaigns by themselves. To trigger a campaign, the anonymous event must be associated with a person within 72 hours of the track_anonymous
request.
# Arguments
# anonymous_id (required, nullable) - the id representing the unknown person.
# name (required) - the name of the event you want to track.
# attributes (optional) - related information you want to attach to the event.
$customerio.track_anonymous(anonymous_id, "product_view", :type => "socks" )
Use the recipient
attribute to specify the email address to send the messages to. See our documentation on how to use anonymous events for more details.
If you previously sent invite events, you can achieve the same functionality by sending an anonymous event with nil
for the anonymous identifier. To send anonymous invites, your event must include a recipient
attribute.
$customerio.track_anonymous(nil, "invite", :recipient => "[email protected]" )
To send push notifications, you can add ios and android device tokens to a customer:
$customerio.add_device(5, "my_ios_device_id", "ios")
$customerio.add_device(5, "my_android_device_id", "android")
Optionally, last_used
can be passed in to specify the last touch of the device. Otherwise, this attribute is set by the API.
$customerio.add_device(5, "my_ios_device_id", "ios", {:last_used=>Time.now.to_i})
Deleting a device token will remove it from the associated customer to stop further push notifications from being sent for that device
$customerio.delete_device(5, "my_device_token")
Deletes the customer with the provided id if it exists and suppresses all future events and identifies for that customer.
$customerio.suppress(5)
Start tracking events and identifies again for a previously suppressed customer. Note when a user is suppressed thier history is deleted and unsupressing them wil not recover that history.
$customerio.unsuppress(5)
To use the Customer.io Transactional API, create an instance of the API client using an app key and create a request object of your message type.
Create a new SendEmailRequest
object containing:
transactional_message_id
: the ID of the transactional message you want to send, or thebody
,from
, andsubject
of a new message.to
: the email address of your recipients- an
identifiers
object containing theid
of your recipient. If theid
does not exist, Customer.io creates it. - a
message_data
object containing properties that you want reference in your message using liquid. - You can also send attachments with your message. Use
attach
to encode attachments.
Use send_email
referencing your request to send a transactional message. Learn more about transactional messages and SendEmailRequest
properties.
require "customerio"
client = Customerio::APIClient.new("your API key", region: Customerio::Regions::US)
request = Customerio::SendEmailRequest.new(
to: "[email protected]",
transactional_message_id: "3",
message_data: {
name: "Person",
items: {
name: "shoes",
price: "59.99",
},
products: [],
},
identifiers: {
id: "2",
},
)
file = File.open('<file-path>', 'r')
request.attach("filename", file.read)
begin
response = client.send_email(request)
puts response
rescue Customerio::InvalidResponse => e
puts e.code, e.message
end
Create a new SendPushRequest
object containing:
transactional_message_id
: the ID or trigger name of the transactional message you want to send.- an
identifiers
object containing theid
oremail
of your recipient. If the profile does not exist, Customer.io creates it.
Use send_push
referencing your request to send a transactional message. Learn more about transactional messages and SendPushRequest
properties.
require "customerio"
client = Customerio::APIClient.new("your API key", region: Customerio::Regions::US)
request = Customerio::SendPushRequest.new(
transactional_message_id: "3",
message_data: {
name: "Person",
items: {
name: "shoes",
price: "59.99",
},
products: [],
},
identifiers: {
id: "2",
},
)
begin
response = client.send_push(request)
puts response
rescue Customerio::InvalidResponse => e
puts e.code, e.message
end
- Fork it
- Clone your fork (
git clone [email protected]:MY_USERNAME/customerio-ruby.git && cd customerio-ruby
) - Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature
) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Added some feature'
) - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature
) - Create new Pull Request