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Customer.io Ruby

A ruby client for the Customer.io Journeys Track API.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'customerio'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself:

$ gem install customerio

Usage

Before we get started: API client vs. JavaScript snippet

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.

Setup

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.

Identify logged in customers

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"
)

Updating customers: Changing identifiers

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.

Updating customers: Using email address

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 the customer_id field of identify_customer_id, you will need to prefix it with "cio_". E.g.: "cio_f000000d" for a cio_id of f000000d.
  • The identify method can identify the person using one of customer_id, cio_id or id. The order of precedence is customer_id > cio_id > id.

Deleting customers

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)

Merge duplicate customer profiles

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]")

Tracking a custom event

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)

Tracking anonymous events

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.

Anonymous invite events

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]" )

Adding a mobile device

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})

Removing a mobile device

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")

Suppress a user

Deletes the customer with the provided id if it exists and suppresses all future events and identifies for that customer.

$customerio.suppress(5)

Unsuppress a user

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)

Send Transactional Messages

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.

Email

Create a new SendEmailRequest object containing:

  • transactional_message_id: the ID of the transactional message you want to send, or the body, from, and subject of a new message.
  • to: the email address of your recipients
  • an identifiers object containing the id of your recipient. If the id 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

Push

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 the id or email 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

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Clone your fork (git clone [email protected]:MY_USERNAME/customerio-ruby.git && cd customerio-ruby)
  3. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
  5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  6. Create new Pull Request