Reading Time: 5 minutes AI assistants are getting better at helping marketers work smarter. But there’s still one big challenge: tools and data don’t always talk to each other.  Lifecycle marketers know this struggle all too well. They manage campaigns across multiple platforms and often depend on engineering or BI teams just to get basic tasks done. However, Model Context Protocols (MCPs) could be a major breakthrough. This new open standard makes it possible for AI tools to connect directly with systems like CRMs, ESPs, analytics tools, and more, without needing custom integrations every time. To better understand what MCPs are and how they could reshape lifecycle marketing, we spoke with Aboli Gangreddiwar, a marketing leader who has been exploring MCPs and recently published a deep dive on Lifecycle Luminaries.  In our conversation, we explored how MCPs could potentially streamline marketing workflows, unlock deeper personalization, and even reduce dependency on engineering support. Let’s jump in.   What Are Model Context Protocols and Why Should Marketers Care Think of MCPs like a universal translator for your marketing stack. Just like HTTP allows any browser to access any website, MCPs allow AI agents (like ChatGPT or Claude) to interact with your marketing tools using a shared standard. “I think of it kind of like a USB-C for your marketing stack,” Aboli explained. “If you’re using Databricks as your CDP and Hubspot as your ESP, MCP could potentially let them talk to each other in a more seamless way. You wouldn’t need a BI ticket every time you want a new data field.” You still need to connect each tool to a Model Context Protocol, but once that’s done, any AI agent that supports the protocol can securely access and act on the tool’s data or capabilities, without needing a custom integration for each new agent or use case. This concept is exciting for lifecycle marketing because this function of marketing is very complex. It uses personalized, multi-channel campaigns to engage customers throughout their entire journey by leveraging data and technology. With lifecycle marketing, businesses can deliver targeted messages at the right time and through the right channel, maximizing customer lifetime value and achieving sustainable competitive advantage.  But that’s easier said than done, especially when your systems don’t play nicely together. Some of the most common challenges marketers face today include: Disconnected data across CRMs, ESPs, CDPs, and analytics tools Slow campaign execution due to manual workflows and tool-hopping Dependence on engineering for things like data access, new integrations, or field availability Time-consuming analysis of A/B tests and campaign performance “These pain points are why the potential of MCPs feels so exciting,” Aboli said. “If we could use a single interface to access campaign data, build emails, QA them, and even send them, it would fundamentally change the way we work.”   What Model Context Protocols Could Unlock The real power of MCPs is in how they can bring together all the disconnected parts of a marketer’s workflow. With the right setup, AI agents could pull data from your CDP, generate content in your ESP, QA the emails in Litmus, and trigger the send, all from a single prompt. “We’ve always had these disconnected steps in lifecycle marketing,” Aboli shared. “Building emails, testing them, pulling performance data. MCPs give you a vision where those tools can operate together more fluidly through natural-language interfaces.” Here are some of the most promising use cases marketers are starting to explore: Smarter segmentation using real-time data from multiple sources More personalized content based on live behavior and approved messaging Automated test analysis, including stat sig calculations and performance summaries Cross-channel orchestration, where AI picks the right message, timing, and channel based on user behavior Aboli pointed out that reporting alone is a huge opportunity. “Imagine your AI agent connects directly to Tableau, pulls campaign performance, calculates statistical significance, and summarizes the results for you. That would save hours of work every week.”   How to Get Started with MCPs as a Marketer: 4 Steps Even though most teams aren’t using MCPs at scale just yet, there are plenty of ways to start preparing and experimenting. Aboli shared a few low-lift ideas for teams who want to get ahead of the curve. 1. Start with documentation “Whatever lives in a marketer’s head needs to be written down,” she said. That includes campaign rules, funnel stages, brand guidelines, and compliance requirements. AI needs this context to be useful. 2. Try custom GPTs for everyday tasks You don’t need deep technical skills to build a custom GPT. Aboli recommends starting with high-volume tasks like email copywriting or proofing. “You can upload your templates, brand voice, common legal disclaimers, even your QA checklist. It won’t get you to 100%, but it can get you to 70 or 80.” 3. Test Zapier’s MCP integration Zapier recently launched MCP support in beta, giving marketers access to thousands of tools through a single interface. “If you’re already using tools like Databricks or BigQuery, you can explore simple automations without involving too much engineering resources,” Aboli said. 4. Start mapping your first agentic use case Not sure where to begin? Look at what’s slowing you down. “One area I see over and over is data activation,” Aboli said. “Marketers want to personalize campaigns but often don’t have access to the data they need. If MCP can help solve that, it’s a great place to start.”   How MCPs Could Reshape the Future of Lifecycle Marketing Model Context Protocols are still in their early stages, but they signal a shift in how lifecycle marketers can approach automation, personalization, and execution. For years, marketers have been forced to work around the limitations of their tools: waiting on data access, dealing with disconnected systems, and relying on manual processes that drain time and energy. MCPs offer a different vision, one where AI agents are not just helpful assistants but true collaborators. By allowing tools to “speak the same language,” MCPs make it possible for marketers to connect insights to action faster than ever before. Whether it’s building a segment, generating personalized email content, or analyzing campaign results, the pieces start to click into place more naturally. Of course, there’s still a gap between where the technology is today and the fully automated, AI-assisted workflows marketers dream about. But the path forward is clear, and it’s more accessible than it might seem. As Aboli emphasized, starting small with documentation, simple GPT setups, or lightweight integrations can provide real value while preparing your team for what’s coming next. Marketers who embrace these tools early will have a distinct advantage. They’ll be the ones moving faster, experimenting more confidently, and unlocking personalization at scale without burning out their teams. And as more vendors build support for Model Context Protocols, the barrier to entry will only continue to drop. “You don’t have to do it all today,” Aboli reminded us. “But you can start now.” If you’re a lifecycle marketer feeling the pressure of disconnected tools and data silos, this may be the moment to lean in, explore the possibilities, and take the first step toward a smarter, more connected future.   To learn more about MoEngage’s AI capabilities and how our platform supports B2C lifecycle marketers across industries, request a demo today. The post Model Context Protocols (MCPs): The Next Big Shift for Lifecycle Marketers? appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 16 minutes We don’t need to tell you that 43% of marketers have seen better customer experiences with marketing automation. And you don’t need a reminder that marketing automation software can save time. You’ve heard it a hundred times already. The real question is: which tools are actually worth using, and which are just eating up your budget with over-the-top features no one uses? In this guide, we’re cutting through the noise to break down the five best marketing automation software platforms that are easy to use, actually deliver, and won’t crush your budget.   What is Marketing Automation Software? Marketing automation software is a technology designed to streamline, automate, and measure a wide range of online marketing activities such as email campaigns, lead nurturing, customer segmentation, personalized messaging, and customer journey tracking — all managed from a single, centralized dashboard. Many businesses with great ideas struggle to grow. The challenge? Manually managing marketing tasks leads to burnout and inconsistent messaging. Without marketing automation, it’s difficult to see what’s truly effective and to act on insights quickly. Marketing automation software addresses these issues by automating repetitive tasks, ensuring consistent communication, and providing data-driven insights for faster, better decisions, allowing businesses to scale efficiently.   What Types of Marketing Automation Tools Are Available? Not all marketing automation tools are built to solve the same problem; and that’s where most teams get tripped up. Choosing the wrong type means you’ll either overpay for features you won’t use, or miss out on capabilities that actually move the needle. Types of Marketing Automation Software at a Glance Tool Type What It Does Pros Cons Email Marketing Automation Tools Automate email campaigns, segmentation, and A/B testing. Quick setup, easy to use, great for email-focused strategies. Limited cross-channel support, and can feel robotic. CRM-Integrated Automation Platforms Combine marketing automation with CRM data for seamless lead nurturing. Full view of customer journey, ideal for complex sales cycles. Expensive, require resources for setup, steep learning curve. Social Media Automation Tools Schedule posts, track engagement, and automate responses. Save time, ensure consistent posting across platforms. Lack deep personalization, can feel automated and impersonal. Customer Journey/Workflow Tools Map out and automate personalized customer journeys. Highly customizable, great for dynamic customer engagement. Complex setup, requires clear customer data and resources. All-in-One Marketing Suites Integrate email, CRM, social, landing pages, and analytics. Everything in one place, scale as your business grows. Feature bloat, high cost, steep learning curve. Here’s a breakdown of the major types of marketing automation software, what they’re good at, and where they might fall short. 1. Email Marketing Automation Tools These are the bread and butter of marketing automation. Think of them as your go-to for creating, sending, and optimizing emails — from simple newsletters to more advanced drip campaigns. They take care of segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, and scheduling. What’s great about them: If your business revolves around email marketing (which it probably does), these email marketing automation tools are built for speed and ease. You can send tailored emails based on customer behavior, run automated follow-up sequences, and even trigger messages based on time zones or customer activity. Where they fall short: These tools are fantastic for email campaigns, but they can’t handle everything. If you need more cross-channel capabilities or in-depth customer journey tracking, you’ll need something more robust. Plus, email fatigue is real; too much automation can sometimes feel a bit robotic. 2. CRM-Integrated Automation Platforms These are for teams that want their marketing and sales teams to work seamlessly together. They integrate marketing automation directly into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, making it easy to track leads, score them, and trigger follow-ups. What’s great about them: They bring all your customer data into one place — so whether someone interacts with your email, visits your website, or even calls your sales team, you get a full picture of their journey and behavior. If your sales cycle is long or complex, having everything synced up in one system is a game-changer. You can build workflows that nurture leads from the first touch all the way to a closed deal. Where they fall short: They’re not always easy to set up and require a good amount of buy-in from both your marketing and sales teams. Plus, they can get really expensive if you’re scaling fast, and the learning curve is steeper than you might expect. If you don’t have the resources to keep everything aligned, this kind of marketing automation tool can become a mess. 3. Social Media Automation Tools These tools focus on automating your social media efforts. From scheduling posts across multiple platforms to tracking engagement and even automating responses, social automation tools can save you a ton of time. What’s great about them: If your brand has a heavy social media presence, these tools can help you stay consistent without burning out. You can plan weeks of posts in advance, track how your content is performing, and engage with your audience on autopilot. Where they fall short: Social media automation tools often fall short when it comes to personalization or deeper customer insights. While they help you manage content and engagement, they’re not built to nurture leads or manage complex customer journeys. And let’s be honest — automation on social media can feel, well, automated. Customers notice when you don’t show up with a human touch. 4. Customer Journey/Workflow Automation Tools These are the tools that take personalization to the next level. Instead of just automating one-off tasks like sending an email, these marketing automation tools help you map out an entire customer journey. They allow you to build complex workflows where a customer’s actions trigger specific responses, like sending an offer, changing the content they see, or re-engaging them with an email sequence. What’s great about them: If your business has a detailed customer lifecycle or funnel, these tools allow you to create dynamic, personalized experiences. For example, if a customer browses a product but doesn’t buy it, you can automatically trigger a series of emails that offer discounts or more product info. The level of customization can really increase engagement and conversions. Where they fall short: These marketing automation software tools can be powerful, but they’re not the easiest to set up. If you don’t have clear data on your customer journey or if your funnel is still in the early stages, you might end up building overly complicated workflows that don’t drive real value. They can also require a fair amount of resources to build and maintain properly — from setting up detailed workflows to continuously optimizing them as per customer journey analytics as your business scales. 5. All-in-One Marketing Automation Suites These platforms try to do it all — from email marketing automation to CRM integration, social media management, landing page creation, analytics, and more. What’s great about them: If you’re a small-to-medium business (SMB) that wants everything in one place, these suites can help you consolidate your tools and get a unified view of your marketing efforts. No need to jump from platform to platform anymore. They also scale with you as your business grows, adding features as needed. Where they fall short: The downside? Feature bloat. These tools often pack in more than you need, and you end up paying for a lot of extra features you’ll never use. Plus, the onboarding can be time-consuming, and there’s a steep learning curve. Be careful not to get too comfortable in one system. If you outgrow it, you might find it difficult to migrate your data to a new platform without major headaches.   How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Software Choosing the right marketing automation software is a big decision — one that can either streamline your marketing efforts or lead to more headaches. So, what should you really consider before you pick a platform? Here’s a detailed guide to help you navigate the process. 1. Understand Your Marketing Goals and Needs First things first, what exactly are you trying to achieve with this tool? Whether your goal is to drive lead generation, increase customer retention, or automate repetitive tasks, your objectives should be at the core of your decision-making process. What to consider: What’s the primary goal — leads, engagement, or sales? Do you need full customer journey automation or just parts of it? Is multi-channel support (email, SMS, social) important? What metrics will define success? The clearer your goals are, the better you’ll be able to assess whether a platform can meet them. 2. Ease of Use and Setup A great marketing automation tool is one that your team can adopt quickly and easily. It shouldn’t require days of training or a full-time technical team just to get it up and running. Ease of use matters, especially if your team doesn’t have a dedicated marketing tech expert. What to consider: How long does setup take? Is the interface intuitive? Can your team start using it quickly? Are tutorials and onboarding resources available? 3. Integration with Existing Systems You probably already have tools in place that power different aspects of your marketing strategy. A new marketing automation platform shouldn’t create a silo; rather, it should be an extension of your current systems. Ask yourself, “How well does this tool integrate with our existing tech stack?” What to consider: Does it integrate with your CRM, email, and analytics tools? Is syncing customer data and marketing activities easy? Are APIs and pre-built integrations available? Integrations often separate a smooth customer experience from a headache down the road. 4. Scalability Your marketing automation software should grow with your brand’s needs and the complexity of your marketing efforts. So, look for a platform to accommodate future needs and handle increased data, more contacts, and expanded functionality. What to consider: Will this tool be able to scale with your team’s growing needs and increasing data volumes? Does the tool allow for easy expansion, like adding new users, features, or channels? Does the platform offer flexible pricing or feature upgrades to meet future demands for marketing automation campaigns? Choosing a scalable solution from the start saves you from a replacement down the road. 5. Budget and Pricing Structure While it’s tempting to go for the tool with the most features, it’s essential to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO). Some marketing automation tools might seem affordable upfront, but come with hidden fees or significant costs as you scale. What to consider: What is the pricing model — per user, per feature, or based on usage volume? Does the platform offer different pricing tiers depending on features and scale, or is it a one-size-fits-all tool? Are there hidden fees for additional users, integrations, or customer support? Being mindful of costs ensures you’re getting the right value for your investment. 6. Customer Support and Resources Support is crucial, especially when you’re dealing with a complex tool that’s integral to your marketing operations. Make sure the marketing automation software offers reliable support channels and resources to help your team get the most out of it. What to consider: Is 24/7 support available? Can you reach support easily (email, chat, phone)? Is there a structured onboarding program? With the right support, you can avoid costly downtime and ensure smooth operations. 7. Reporting and Analytics You need to be able to track your performance in order to improve your campaigns. Make sure the marketing automation tool you choose offers robust reporting and analytics features so you can measure ROI, spot trends, and optimize your strategies in real time. What to consider: Can you track and analyze data across multiple channels from one dashboard? Does the platform provide customizable reports for specific metrics (e.g., engagement rates, conversion rates, etc.)? How real-time is the data, and can you drill down into more detailed reports? Can you export data for deeper analysis or share it with your stakeholders? Choosing the right marketing automation software doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By focusing on your goals, ease of use, integration, scalability, budget, support, and reporting needs, you can find a solution that fits your business and helps you build better customer relationships. But once you’ve narrowed down your options, it’s crucial to look for key features that can make or break your marketing efforts, which we’ll explore in the next section.   8 Essential Features of Marketing Automation Software If the term “marketing automation software” makes you think, “OK, but what does it actually do?” — you’re not alone. It’s one of those tech labels that gets tossed around a lot, but rarely explained clearly. Here’s what truly matters when picking the right platform — and what MoEngage delivers. 1. Cross-Channel Automation That Actually Works A real marketing automation platform doesn’t stop at email. It should automate at least two or more of these channels: Email SMS In-app messaging Push notifications On-site messaging Digital advertising You need the flexibility to create journeys like: If a customer clicks this button, send that notification. If they ignore an email, retarget them elsewhere. And it shouldn’t feel like coding a spaceship. Customers don’t stick to one channel, and neither should your campaigns. Tools like MoEngage make it easy to connect experiences across every touchpoint, without overcomplicating setup. 2. Solid Integration Marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You’ve got a CRM, a CMS, maybe a CDP, sales pipelines, customer support tools — and if your marketing automation platform can’t talk to them all, it becomes another silo. Integrated systems unlock better customer insights and smarter campaigns. For example, MoEngage is built to integrate deeply with the tools you already use, so you can actively engage data — not just collect it. 3. Visual Workflow Builder That Makes Sense A drag-and-drop journey builder should do more than look pretty. It should allow you to: Set triggers (e.g., customer sign-ups, link clicks, cart abandonment) Define branches based on customer behavior (clicked vs. ignored) Automate follow-ups, delays, and lead scoring Manage time-based sequences without coding You don’t just want to automate tasks; you want to orchestrate meaningful journeys. If your tool can’t map the customer lifecycle visually and let you tweak flows fast, it’ll slow you down more than it helps. That being said, MoEngage’s Journey Builder gives you the flexibility to create dynamic customer experiences visually. You can map out entire lifecycle journeys that adjust based on behavior, all while maintaining a smooth, intuitive workflow. 4. Price That Matches What You Actually Get Some tools boast of “custom pricing,” but let’s be honest — that often means “Enter your email so we can push you into a $10K contract.” On the flip side, others promise everything under the sun for free and then hit you with hidden limits the second you try to scale. A good marketing automation platform should justify its price with actual outcomes. With MoEngage, you get value for what you pay. No inflated costs or surprises as you grow. The pricing structure reflects the powerful features you’ll actually use, not just some theoretical high-tier plan. 5. Personalization That’s Actually Smart Personalization goes beyond “Hey, {First Name}.” A good marketing automation tool pulls real-time data, like browsing behavior, engagement history, or past purchases — and lets you: Customize messages based on customer behavior Segment customers successfully Send tailored content at the right moment Run A/B or multivariate tests on message variants Personalization drives relevance. Relevance drives conversion. If your tool can’t make content feel timely and targeted, it’s just noise your customers will tune out. MoEngage empowers true 1:1 personalization at scale, helping brands deliver messages that feel timely, thoughtful, and meaningful, not spammy. 6. Segmentation That Doesn’t Break Your Brain You shouldn’t need SQL to create an audience. A proper marketing automation tool lets you build segments with filters like: Engagement activity (opens, clicks, visits) Demographic data Customer lifecycle stages Purchase behavior or lead score Great campaigns start with great targeting. Without smart segmentation, even the best messaging falls flat because it lands in the wrong inbox at the wrong time. And with MoEngage, segmentation is straightforward yet powerful. You can easily create precise segments in seconds using simple AI prompts. Adjust them as needed, making sure your messages always hit the right target. 7. Analytics That Go Beyond Open Rates This is where a lot of marketing automation tools quietly fail. You need more than vanity metrics. A strong platform gives you visibility into conversion paths, drop-offs, engagement by channel, cohort behavior, and lets you slice and dice that data by campaign, audience, or even individual flows. Data should help you optimize decisions, not just check a box. MoEngage’s powerful analytics provide in-depth insights into every stage of your customer journey. Track conversions, cohort behaviors, and customer interactions across multiple channels, then fine-tune campaigns with data-driven decisions. 8. Integration-Ready (Not “Integration Eventually”) Marketing automation doesn’t exist in isolation. You need native or low-lift integrations with: CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.) CMS platforms (WordPress, Webflow, etc.) Analytics tools (GA4, Mixpanel) Ecommerce systems Digital ad platforms Your data should flow seamlessly between tools. If you’re stuck syncing CSV files or setting up brittle third-party connectors every week, it’s not automation — it’s a time suck. MoEngage takes this seriously, offering native integrations that ensure your data flows seamlessly between platforms. Forget about spending hours syncing CSV files or dealing with unstable third-party connectors. MoEngage ensures that everything you need is connected out of the box, keeping your marketing ecosystem running efficiently. To help you make an informed decision, here’s a quick overview of the key features you should look for in a marketing automation platform, and how MoEngage stands out in each of these areas. Feature Why This is a Key Criterion How MoEngage Excels Cross-Channel Automation Seamless engagement across touchpoints boosts retention. Automates email, SMS, push, in-app, and more from one platform. Solid Integration Integrations ensure smooth data flow and efficiency. Integrates with CRMs, CMS, and analytics tools like Salesforce and HubSpot. Visual Workflow Builder Easy-to-use workflows save time and enhance campaign accuracy. Drag-and-drop builder for quick, no-code journey creation. Price That Matches Value Fair pricing ensures you only pay for what you use. Scalable plans suited for businesses of all sizes. Personalization Personalized content drives better engagement and conversion. Real-time behavioral data for highly targeted, personalized messaging. Segmentation Effective segmentation improves targeting and conversion. Dynamic segmentation based on customer behavior and data. Analytics Data insights optimize campaigns and improve ROI. Advanced analytics for cross-channel performance tracking. Integration-Ready Easy integrations reduce manual work and improve accuracy. Seamless integrations with major platforms like Salesforce and Shopify.     How to Integrate Marketing Automation Tools Into Your Tech Stack So you’ve picked a marketing automation software. Great! But just buying the tool doesn’t mean you’ll get the expected results. The real value comes from how well it plugs into your existing tech stack, and how aligned your data, teams, and workflows are. Here’s how to do that right. 1. Audit Your Existing Stack and Map the Workflow Gaps Before you plug in anything new, take a look at what’s already running — CRM, CMS, analytics tools, sales systems, support platforms, ad networks, etc. Ask yourself: Where do leads come from? Where does data drop off or get siloed? Which tools already talk to each other and which don’t? This clarity shows you exactly where automation can close the loop — whether it’s nurturing leads from form fill to conversion, or retargeting dormant customers without manual work. 2. Choose a Tool That Plays Nice With the Rest Don’t get stuck with a shiny marketing automation software platform that requires duct-taping 10 APIs or third-party connectors. Look for a solution that offers: Native integrations with your CRM, CMS, and ad tools Webhooks and APIs for deeper custom connections Flexible data mapping (so customer info syncs cleanly) The smoother the integration, the faster your team can launch campaigns and the less time your developers spend troubleshooting data sync issues. 3. Define Unified Data Models and Tagging Systems Automation relies heavily on clean data. Before syncing anything, align on: What a lead or customer means across systems How lifecycle stages are defined to run customer lifecycle marketing campaigns Which tags, events, or properties get tracked How you’ll handle duplicates or missing values Messy data leads to missed triggers, bad personalization, and broken journeys. Having a consistent model avoids all that and makes reporting far more reliable. 4. Set Up Automated Data Syncs and Triggers Once the connection points are in place, you’ll want your automation to kick in based on real-time events, not stale lists exported weekly. Set up: Real-time syncs for lead activity (form fills, downloads, visits) Behavior-based triggers (e.g., cart abandonment, pricing page views) Feedback loops from other tools (support tickets, product usage) The entire point of marketing automation is to act quickly and intelligently. You can’t do that if you’re relying on old data or manual imports. 5. Test, Validate, and Continuously Monitor Even well-planned integrations can hit snags — missing fields, broken workflows, or data drift. Set up: End-to-end testing with dummy data before going live Alerts for failed syncs or dropped contacts Regular audits to ensure all systems are still in alignment Integration isn’t a “set and forget” task. Treat it like a living system. Catching issues early means fewer unsuccessful campaigns and missed opportunities.   5 Best Marketing Automation Software, Tools, and Platforms Choosing the right tool can feel overwhelming with so many options out there. To help you cut through the noise, here’s a quick look at some of the top marketing automation software tools and platforms that bring unique features to the table, each designed to streamline your marketing and drive real results. 1. Best for Cross-Channel Marketing and Real-Time Engagement: MoEngage MoEngage stands out as the go-to platform for teams that care about more than just email automation. It’s built for brands that want to talk to their customers across every channel—email, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp, in-app messaging, you name it—and actually make it feel like a single, connected conversation. What makes it stand out: Dynamic segmentation and real-time customer profiling. Predictive AI (Sherpa AI) that recommends the best channel and the best time to engage. Visual drag-and-drop journey orchestration that supports branching, testing, and channel-switching logic in one flow. Built-in campaign optimization based on engagement scores and delivery performance. Strong mobile-first features (especially relevant for app-based businesses). Deep analytics to see what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next. Whether you’re trying to onboard new customers, win back lapsed ones, or boost retention, MoEngage gives you the tools to do it easily. Pricing: Starts around $750/month for growth plans; enterprise pricing varies based on volume and features. Best for: Mid-sized to enterprise-level companies in industries like Ecommerce, fintech, OTT, travel, and BFSI—especially those with a mobile app or multi-channel presence. If your marketing team is focused on delivering consistent, personalized experiences across platforms, this is a strong fit. 2. Best for Simple Automation and Ease of Use: HubSpot HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is one of the simplest CRM and marketing automation platforms out there. It offers no-code workflow builders, lead scoring, and AI-powered content tools like Breeze Agents to streamline customer engagement. Pricing: Ranges from $800 to $3,600/month, depending on the features and usage scale. Best for: Small to mid-sized businesses or B2B marketing teams looking for an easy way to get started with marketing automation and CRM without being overwhelmed. 3. Best for Complex Campaigns and Advanced Segmentation: ActiveCampaign ActiveCampaign excels in customer segmentation and personalized customer experiences. It’s great for crafting targeted email campaigns based on customer behavior and interactions. If you want to automate complex workflows or need a deeper dive into customer engagement, this one’s a solid choice. Pricing: Ranges from $29 to $149/month, based on features and number of contacts. Best for: Small to mid-sized businesses looking for an affordable, all-in-one marketing and sales automation solution. 4. Best for Ecommerce Marketing Automation: Klaviyo Klaviyo is the go-to marketing automation tool for Ecommerce businesses looking to drive revenue through personalized messaging. It integrates seamlessly with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, allowing you to send triggered emails based on a customer’s browsing history, past purchases, and other actions. Beyond email, Klaviyo also offers SMS marketing automation, enabling Ecommerce brands to engage customers through multiple channels. Its powerful segmentation and reporting tools help Ecommerce brands personalize their marketing at scale. Pricing: Offers a free plan, with paid plans starting at $20/month. Best for: Ecommerce businesses looking for deep integration with their store and the ability to drive personalized marketing through email and SMS. 5. Best for Simple Email Automation: Mailchimp Mailchimp is steadily evolving from a basic email tool into a more complete marketing automation platform. While some of the newer automation features are still catching up, its core email automation remains incredibly user-friendly and reliable. If you’re just starting out or looking for something straightforward that gets the job done, Mailchimp is a solid pick. Pricing: Plans range from $6 to $175/month based on features and contact volume. Best for: Small businesses or solo marketers who want a no-fuss way to automate emails without getting into complex workflows.   Use the Right Marketing Automation Software for Your Needs At the end of the day, the right marketing automation software tool can totally change the customer engagement game. With all the ideal automation features and tools we’ve gone over, you’re well on your way to finding the perfect fit for your team, whether you need something simple, advanced segmentation, or full-funnel automation. If you’re ready to take your customer engagement to the next level, MoEngage’s cross-channel automation can help you do just that. Check out how MoEngage can work for you, and don’t just take our word for it — book a demo to see it in action. The post Best Marketing Automation Software: 5 Tools to Try appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 11 minutes The pace of the world is incredibly fast. It’s wild how everyone expects instant communication from the brands they regularly interact with. Modern businesses need email marketing automation software to help them handle tasks efficiently, as manual processes are no longer viable in today’s ever-shifting environment. Now’s as good a time as any to streamline your email workflows. The trick? Finding the right tool for your unique business case. In this post, we’ll help you find the perfect software for automating your brand’s email marketing campaigns. Here. We. Go.   What is Email Marketing Automation Software? Email marketing automation software is a smart tool that streamlines your email campaigns by automatically sending personalized, timely messages at scale to segmented audiences. It tracks email engagement and optimizes your outreach, so marketers like you can generate sales, nurture leads efficiently, and boost overall ROI. Basically, it’s like your own digital assistant that takes care of everything related to email marketing.   4 Benefits of Using Email Marketing Automation Tools Why should email marketing automation software tools be a part of your email marketing strategy today? Let’s dive into these four advantages to find out: Save time: Instead of manually drafting and sending each email, you set up a simple trigger, and your software tool does the rest. This means you can shift your focus to more high-impact projects, boosting productivity without burning out your team. Improve customer experience: You can automate and personalize your email campaigns at scale with software. This makes your customers feel valued, which not only boosts satisfaction but also builds deeper trust over time. Drive more sales: Email marketing automation tools let you use targeted segmentation so your emails can speak directly to each audience group’s needs or pain points. With detailed analytics, you can keep refining your strategy to drive higher conversion rates and more sales. Nurture leads more effectively: With software tools, you can set up a series of carefully timed, personalized follow-up emails that steadily guide leads through their customer journeys. This nurturing process keeps your brand on top of their minds while building trust, slow and steady. Let’s get to the good part already.   5 Best Email Marketing Automation Software and Tools Different brands have different needs. You need to decide what features and capabilities matter the most for your brand’s email campaigns. Our goal here is to help you find the best fit for email marketing automation. So here are our top picks: 1. Best for Omnichannel Engagement and Email Performance Tracking: MoEngage Well, we did say we’re going to help you pick the best email marketing software on the market. And our 1,350 customers, like SoundCloud and Poshmark, do say we’re one of the best, so… (ahem) MoEngage is hands down the best platform for robust email marketing analytics. You can easily track email marketing metrics, audience engagement, and overall growth with MoEngage Analytics. These insights can help you improve email clickthroughs and conversion rates. As for your customers’ omnichannel experience, MoEngage helps you keep it consistent. Some automated email campaigns might involve other channels like SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, and so on. Using this platform can help you continue the conversation with customers across all touchpoints. What stands out about this solution: MoEngage comes with powerful predictive capabilities to boost email engagement rates. It can help you tailor your email campaigns to your customers’ next best action. 2. Best for Ecommerce Integrations: Drip Drip is one of the easiest-to-use email marketing automation tools for Ecommerce brands. Its simple dashboards and intuitive interface have already won hearts. You can go beyond basic personalization to segment your audience based on their behavior. It’s also easy to get crucial Ecommerce data by syncing Drip with over 50 integrated Ecommerce platforms like Shopify, LoyaltyLion, and WooCommerce. However, the tool doesn’t let you simultaneously have more than 50 active automated email workflows. What stands out about this solution: From welcome series and abandoned cart emails to post-purchase and win-back emails, you’ll find more than 20 pre-built email automation workflow templates on Drip. And on MoEngage? Over 30! 3. Best for Multi-Trigger Email Automation: MailerLite Much like Drip, MailerLite is known for its simple UI. Whether your customer adds a product to their cart or buys a product from a specific category, you can easily trigger an automated email workflow. Setting up several triggers (like filling out a form or clicking a link) allows you to add multiple entry points to a single email workflow. This helps you target your audience more precisely. The best part is, you can track and view past actions in your email automation workflow since its activation date. The tool also lets you A/B test up to 3 email workflow variations. What stands out about this solution: Each email automation can have up to 3 triggers. MailerLite also offers a library of email automated workflow templates, so you don’t have to create workflows from scratch. BTW, you’ll get multi-trigger email automation on MoEngage, too. 4. Best for Welcome Email Sequences: EmailOctopus Creating a great first impression should never take the back seat. That’s what EmailOctopus believes in, as an easy-to-use but powerful email marketing automation software platform. You can effortlessly create onboarding email sequences to welcome new subscribers automatically. Plus, it allows you to nurture your audience through complex automation with if/else conditions. The tool’s visual automation editor makes building automated emails easier, and you can also import HTML templates to create them your way. What stands out about this solution: The sheer simplicity of creating onboarding emails! The platform also provides customizable forms and landing pages to help you grow your email list and brand. With a horde of customizable templates and AI that generates readymade welcome email copy and images in seconds, MoEngage also has you in good shape to onboard new customers effectively. 5. Best for CRM Email Marketing Automation: HubSpot Ah, HubSpot — the CRM software giant. A boon not only for marketing and sales teams, but also for customer service teams. The email automation tools in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub let you automate follow-up emails and trigger specific actions based on audience engagement. You can also use CRM data, including contact name, lifecycle stage, and more, to automatically personalize your emails with the most relevant subject lines, CTAs, and links. From email reply tracking and email health reporting to customer journey analytics and predictive lead scoring, HubSpot’s features make it one of the best email marketing automation tools out there. What stands out about this solution: It offers an AI writing assistant that generates email subject lines and copy based on your past email marketing performance. You’ll get data-based suggestions on how to make your automated emails more engaging. It’s a beta feature for now, though. In HubSpot. It’s already there in MoEngage. Honestly, why use 5 different automated email marketing software for different features and use cases, when you can have one tool that applies to all these use cases (hint: MoEngage)? Anyway, now that you’ve seen what the best tools are, let’s examine the most important features you should look out for.   5 Key Features of Email Marketing Automation Software to Evaluate Not all email marketing automation tools are created equal, despite their marketing promises. Your best bet is to find a software platform that offers the following crucial features: 1. Pre-built Email Templates Thoughts like “Should the text go here?” and “Does the image look good there?” shouldn’t flood your mind when setting up automated email marketing campaigns. To begin sending engaging emails immediately, you need pre-built automated email templates. Templates you can customize in keeping with your brand identity and your audience’s behavior and preferences. Why this is a key criterion: Email templates give you a head start. They allow you to quickly roll out campaigns without you clutching at your hair over design. These pre-designed layouts ensure that every message looks great and remains on-brand. 2. Email Personalization Imagine you own a pet food store and you’ve accidentally sent an email about dog food to a cat mom. That’s a facepalm moment for sure, but if you had used an email marketing automation software tool to personalize your emails, you might have avoided making that embarrassing mistake. It goes beyond just using the recipient’s first name, though. Personalization also involves tailoring your email subject lines, content, images, and URLs to the recipient’s behavior, needs, and preferences. More specifically, the tool should let you use personalization attributes like “{{firstname}}”, “{{location}}”, and “{{sender name}}”. And with image personalization, you can insert contextual images in your cart abandonment follow-ups. Why this is a key criterion: When your customer sees that you’ve taken pains to find out about their likes, dislikes, and pain points, they appreciate it. They take it as a sign that you care about them. This builds trust, which makes them more likely to engage with your emails, than if the emails sound too generic. Who doesn’t like feeling special? 3. “Best Time to Send” Email Scheduling What’s the appropriate time for sending emails when customers check their inboxes? 9AM? 3PM? 10PM? One option is to experiment — send emails at different times to see when they’re performing the best. A smarter alternative is to use an email marketing automation tool that simply tells you the best time to send emails. How does it do that? With AI, to analyze your customers’ past behavior and predict when they’re likely to interact with your emails. Why this is a key criterion: What’s the use of sending automated emails when the recipients aren’t likely to interact with them at all? Reaching them at the right moment means higher open rates and better email engagement. Both your resources and your time are saved in the process. 4. A/B Testing No matter which email marketing automation tool you choose, it should let you test and optimize content, email send times, and subject lines. If you can’t compare different versions of the same email, you won’t understand which version your audience resonates most with. In turn, you won’t understand what email elements are most effective in converting the recipients into your customers. Why this is a key criterion: A/B testing provides data-backed insights that allow you to refine every aspect of your email — from the copy to the CTA. By methodically testing differerent variations, you ensure your emails are always evolving to meet customer preferences and improving your overall ROI. 5. Email Marketing Analytics Launching an email campaign is just the first step. To truly succeed, you need to understand how your campaigns perform. “Easier said than done.” No, it isn’t, with the best email marketing automation tools — no kidding! The tool you pick should help you track the open rate, Click-to-open rate (CTOR), unsubscribe rate, and other crucial email marketing metrics. These insights can help you fine-tune your automated marketing emails so they perform better in the future. Why this is a key criterion: Email analytics turn numbers into actionable strategies. When you see, for example, that your open rate is lower than expected, you know it’s time to craft more compelling subject lines. If your unsubscribe rate is creeping upwards of 1%, it’s a clear signal that your email content isn’t meeting customer needs. In short, analytics let you make smarter, data-driven decisions that help you make your emails more and more effective. Now, let’s look at how you can make the most of your email marketing automation tools.   How to Automate Your Emails with Software Here’s a step-by-step guide to automate your emails using any platform: 1. Select an Email Marketing Automation Software Tool Alright, back to square one, folks! Before you can start firing off automated emails, you need to pick the right tool that suits your needs. Does it match your budget and your overall marketing goals? Maybe you’re drawn to tools with robust segmentation, detailed analytics, and seamless integrations. For instance, some platforms (like MoEngage, for example) come with built-in automation features that let you select targeted audience groups and even integrate your emails effortlessly with other channels, like push notifications and SMS. 2. Set Email Automation Triggers Automation triggers are the specific actions or conditions (like a new sign-up, an abandoned cart, or an anniversary) that prompt your system to send an email. By setting these up, you ensure that every customer receives timely and relevant content without you having to lift a finger. Let’s say a customer signs up to your online store, browses your product range, and then pops back in later. With the right trigger setup, your email marketing automation software can send a tailored reminder email at just the right moment. 3. Create and Segment Your Email List Not speaking to the right audience? How would you know what’s the right message to send then? This is where managing your email list comes in handy. Start by gathering subscribers through signup forms. Then, categorize your audience into specific groups based on their behavior, location, purchase history, and even more factors. Some software platforms let you segment your audience with a few clicks. MoEngage, for instance, offers deep segmentation features that help you target your subscribers based on everything, from past purchases to browsing habits. You can also create customer segments (like ‘Promising’, ‘Price-sensitive’, ‘Hibernating’, and so on) using an RFM analysis on MoEngage. Basically, it lets you categorize customers based on their recency (when they last interacted with your website), frequency (how often they interacted with your website), and monetary value (what their last purchase was worth). The result? Higher open rates, better engagement, and emails that truly resonate because they’re speaking directly to the person reading them. 4. Built-In AI to Design and Personalize Your Emails Your emails should look as good as they sound. Period. Start with a compelling subject line that encourages your audience to open your emails. Use templates to maintain consistency in your branding, and include dynamic content fields for personalized touches. MoEngage offers a library of email templates with responsive design elements that look great on any device. Drag and drop images, text blocks, and CTAs to customize email templates and design amazing emails. You can also use MoEngage’s Sherpa AI to personalize your emails based on customers’ browsing history, interests, and behavior. And with Merlin AI from MoEngage, just use a pre-built prompt from a dropdown list or enter your own prompts to get high-quality images and email copy in seconds. 5. Build an Email Workflow (Optional) Crafting a workflow can transform a one-off email into a natural conversation with your customer. It’s basically an email marketing journey, aligning with the customer journey — from a welcome email, through a series of educational messages, to a follow-up after a purchase. Some email marketing automation platforms allow you to set branch points where recipients can receive different content based on actions taken or not taken. For example, when using MoEngage, you can build a personalized series that feels more like a conversation than a cold, automated sequence. This builds a stronger relationship with your audience over time. 6. Schedule Your Emails Scheduling ensures that your emails hit inboxes when your audiences are most likely to engage. MoEngage’s Sherpa AI lets you consider time zones and peak open times for each customer, so your emails are always as impactful as possible. 7. Monitor Your Performance Last but not least, you need to monitor and tweak your campaigns based on performance metrics. Keep an eye on open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and overall email engagement. Some tools offer built-in analytics dashboards that give you detailed insights into how your emails are performing. MoEngage comes with robust reporting features that not only track key metrics, but also help you optimize your future campaigns with A/B testing and detailed engagement reports. What’s more, MoEngage’s Merlin AI generates email performance reports as PDFs, charts, CSVs, and any other format you need. Need a report on quarterly email conversion rates over the last year? All you need to do is ask.   Choose the Best Email Marketing Automation Software Today Still not sure? Think — what if your email marketing automation software could help you: Build custom emails with zero code Automate emails based on your customer journey, from welcome emails to win-back follow-ups Personalize content or product recommendations at scale with AI Automatically update your customers about their bank balance, passwords, and delivery status on time Land your emails in customers’ inboxes, not their spam folders Predict what would work best for higher email engagement You’re in luck. Because you’ll find all these features and more on MoEngage. Take a 1-1 demo and see what wonders MoEngage can work for your automated email campaigns. The post Best Email Marketing Automation Software for Any Industry appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Today, businesses have access to an unprecedented amount of customer data, from website interactions and in-app behavior to purchase history and real-time engagement signals. However, having data is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in using that data effectively to craft personalized, high-impact marketing strategies. This is where segmentation plays a crucial role.. Segmentation has always been the key to driving personalized engagement that delivers results. Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands offering personalized experiences (Epsilon), and segmented campaigns can generate up to 760% more revenue than non-segmented ones (Campaign Monitor). By defining the right customer segments, brands ensure that every interaction, whether it’s a push notification, an email, or an ad, is tailored, relevant, and designed to drive action. While filter-based segmentation remains effective, it can slow down marketers: Learning Curve in Filter-Based Segmentation: Creating a customer segment traditionally requires understanding the intricacies of segmentation queries using multiple filters. This involves knowing the rules and logic behind query construction, setting conditions on events and attributes, managing exclusions, and dealing with nested logic. For new users, it can be a steep learning curve, resulting in delays and errors. Events & Attributes Knowledge is Crucial: Building accurate audience segments demands familiarity with the platform’s event taxonomy and user attributes. Knowing which events (e.g., “Product Viewed” vs “Product Added to Cart”) and attributes (e.g., “Category” vs “Brand”) to use is essential. For new users, this process often involves trial and error, or worse, reliance on data teams for assistance, further slowing down segmentation and campaign execution. This delay in segment creation and campaign launch is where Merlin AI Segment Assist makes a difference. What is Merlin AI Segment Assist? Merlin AI, MoEngage’s self-learning Generative AI Engine, merges the creative power of OpenAI (GPT LLM) with MoEngage’s proven engagement capabilities. It’s designed to maximize engagement and deliver more impactful campaigns. If you’ve seen our earlier Merlin-powered products like the AI Copywriter and Designer, you already know how Merlin is revolutionizing every facet of engagement, be it creating compelling campaign copies or generating a diverse array of visuals tailored to your campaign needs. Now, with Merlin AI Segment Assist, we’re transforming the way marketers create and target segments. Merlin AI Segment Assist enables brands to build precise customer segments in seconds using simple, natural language. Marketers can describe their target audience in plain language, and Merlin AI creates the segment for them. What Sets Merlin AI Segment Assist Apart? Merlin AI Segment Assist isn’t just another AI-powered tool; it’s specifically designed to address marketers’ unique and complex segmentation needs. Here’s what makes it stand out: Build Accurate Segments with Guided Prompts Don’t know how to phrase your segmentation request? No problem! Use our pre-built prompt library to structure your queries correctly and get precise results immediately. Fine-Tune Segments for Maximum Impact Refine AI-generated segments quickly by opening them in a filter view to add additional conditions, making the segment even more targeted and specific. From Query to Action in One Click Create segments and immediately act on them—whether it’s exporting users, saving segments, analyzing audiences, or launching campaigns—all from a single interface. Smarter Targeting That Improves Over Time Provide feedback or regenerate segments for more precise results. Merlin learns over time, ensuring that your targeting gets smarter and more accurate with every use. How Can Brands Across Industries Leverage It? Whether you’re a retailer, financial institution, or any other business, Merlin AI Segment Assist can help you create tailored audience segments for any scenario. It works across various use cases, from targeting abandoned cart customers to re-engaging loyal ones, and more. For example: An E-commerce brand would want to target high-intent page visitors. Just prompt Merlin AI with: “Create a segment of users who viewed products from the Apparel category at least 3 times in the last 7 days but didn’t purchase.” A Bank would need to re-engage customers who didn’t complete their credit card application. Simply prompt: “Create a segment of users who started a credit card application in the last 7 days but didn’t complete it.” With Merlin AI Segment Assist, complex segments that require multiple conditions, exclusions, timeframes, and logic can easily be created using prompts in plain, simple language. How Merlin AI for Segmentation Drives Tangible Business Value Speed and precision in segmentation are no longer just nice-to-haves—they’re critical in today’s competitive marketing landscape. Merlin AI Segment Assist allows marketers to go from idea to impact in seconds, enabling them to create precise segments using natural language. The benefits are clear: Accelerated Go-to-Market Speed With natural language prompts, marketers can create and refine segments instantly—there is no need for training or relying on teams. Whether launching a retention campaign or targeting high-intent visitors, Segment Assist reduces time to market and helps brands stay agile and responsive. Maximize and Fast-track Resource Utilization Marketers can quickly create accurate segments in real time without the need to learn segmentation filters or rely on teams for event/attribute knowledge. This saves valuable time and resources, allowing teams to focus on high-value tasks like strategy and execution instead of getting bogged down in technicalities. Fast and accurate segmentation means brands can deliver personalized experiences that resonate with customers. By providing relevant content at the right time, this maximizes conversions and boosts retention. Conclusion Speed, precision, and personalization are everything in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Merlin AI Segment Assist transforms the way brands target and engage their audiences by enabling them to create complex segments in seconds using natural language. With no learning curve, filter-based hassle, or team dependence, marketers can target their audience and deliver personalized experiences effortlessly. With Segment Assist, you’re not just streamlining your targeting; you’re creating impact—faster and smarter. Ready to take your segmentation to the next level? Request a demo today. The post Merlin AI Segment Assist: A Revolutionary New Approach to Audience Targeting appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Email marketing continues to be a cornerstone of customer communication. To make it truly effective, marketers need two things: clarity in their performance data and trust in their audience relationships. How can you be sure your engagement metrics reflect genuine interest? And how do you build a subscriber list grounded in explicit consent and respect for user privacy? Achieving both accuracy and trust is key to simplifying email marketing and driving meaningful results. That’s why we’re introducing two powerful enhancements designed to bring precision to your Email campaign analytics and strengthen your customer connections: Filtering for Email Bot Opens and integrated Email Double Opt-in. Let’s explore how these features address distinct but related challenges, ultimately making your email efforts more transparent and effective. Filtering Email Bot Opens – Unveiling True Engagement For years, marketers relied heavily on the email open rate as a metric to analyze campaign performance. But today, this metric often paints an unclear picture. The reliability of the traditional open rate is declining due to factors such as: Privacy Measures: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), available on its devices, aims to enhance user privacy. It can prevent senders from knowing precisely when an email is opened. A key way it does this is by preloading email images (including tracking pixels) through proxy servers. This registers an “open” regardless of whether the recipient actually viewed the email. Automated Bots: Various automated systems, sometimes used by inbox providers for security scans, also interact with emails. These bots can trigger tracking pixels, mimicking an open action. This leads to inflated open rates. Some marketers report seeing rates jump significantly, sometimes reaching unrealistic highs. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to know if an open came from an interested human or an automated process. Skewed open rates distort other metrics like Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) and hinder accurate assessment of campaign performance and ROI. Budget allocation becomes inefficient, and targeting customers based on such false signals, misses the mark. The Solution: Intelligent Filtering for Accurate Insight MoEngage now helps you cut through this noise with Filtering Email Bot Opens. This feature acts as an intelligent filter, analyzing email interactions to differentiate automated or privacy-related opens from genuine user opens. Here’s what you get: Clear Metrics: You get a transparent breakdown of opens: Total Opens: The traditional count of all open events. User Opens: Opens identified as genuine human interactions. Machine Opens: Opens attributed to bots, automated systems, or privacy proxies. Adjusted Open Rate: We have introduced a more accurate metric calculated using only “User Opens,” providing a true reflection of audience engagement. Platform Integration: This granular data is available across MoEngage – in campaign analytics, aggregate statistics, reports (including adjusted CTOR), Flows, and Segmentation. You can segment audiences explicitly based on “User Opens”. Control & Accuracy: Admins can configure how bot opens are viewed. View-through conversion tracking also leverages “User Opens” for more precise attribution. The Benefits of Accurate Email Open Data Filtering bot opens delivers significant advantages: Reliable Performance Metrics: Understand your actual email engagement based on human interaction. True Engagement Insight: Gauge the real impact of your content and messaging. Better ROI Assessment: Allocate resources effectively by focusing on campaigns that genuinely resonate and drive engagement from customers. Precise Segmentation: Target users based on verified interest for more relevant follow-up campaigns. Dependable A/B Testing: Make confident decisions about email variations based on real user behaviour reflected in the Adjusted Open Rate. By providing a clear view of genuine engagement, Filtering Email Bot Opens lays the foundation for more effective, data-driven email marketing. But accuracy is only part of the equation. Building trust through transparent consent is equally vital. Email Double Opt-in – Building Trust Through Confirmed Consent While accurate metrics tell you how users engage, ensuring you have the right users on your list – those who explicitly want to be there – requires a solid consent process. The Challenge: Ensuring Explicit Consent and Compliance Many email lists rely on “single opt-in,” where providing an email address equals subscription. While easy, this doesn’t always capture explicit, confirmed consent. In an era of heightened privacy awareness and regulations like GDPR, demonstrating clear consent is not just good practice; it’s often a requirement. Users expect transparency, and regulators demand proof of consent. Furthermore, lists built without confirmed interest can suffer from lower engagement, higher bounce rates, and more spam complaints, negatively impacting deliverability and sender reputation. The Solution: Seamless Double Opt-in Integrated within MoEngage MoEngage now streamlines this crucial process with our built-in Email Double Opt-in feature. Here’s how it simplifies building confirmed subscriber lists: Integrated Setup: Enable the feature, and a new “Opt-in Status” user attribute tracks consent (“Single Opted in” by default, updating to “Double Opted in” upon confirmation). Automated Confirmation: Easily create an automated workflow to send a confirmation email upon signup, linking to a verification page. Flexible Confirmation Pages: Use MoEngage’s customizable out-of-the-box (OOTB) landing page or integrate your own custom page. The OOTB page allows logo and text customization. Targeted Sending: A new campaign toggle lets you “Target Double opt-in users,” ensuring promotional emails only go to subscribers who have explicitly confirmed their interest. Delivery reports show if users were skipped due to a lack of double opt-in status. Management & Control: Bulk update opt-in status via CSV uploads for existing lists. You retain control to enable or disable the process. The Benefits of Confirmed Double Opt-in Consent Implementing double opt-in brings substantial business value: Enhanced Compliance: Meet stringent requirements for explicit consent under GDPR and other regulations, reducing legal risks. Improved Deliverability: Build cleaner lists of genuinely interested subscribers, reducing bounces and spam complaints. This helps protect your sender’s reputation and ensures more emails reach the inbox. Stronger Customer Trust: Asking for confirmation demonstrates respect for user preferences and privacy, fostering positive brand perception. Streamlined Operations: Manage the entire double opt-in process efficiently within a single customer engagement platform, freeing up resources previously spent on complex workarounds across multiple different tools. Accuracy and Trust for Simplified, Effective Email Marketing Email marketing thrives on clarity and connection. MoEngage’s Filtering for Email Bot Opens gives you the clarity to understand true engagement by cutting through the noise of automated interactions. Our integrated Email Double Opt-in feature provides the tools to build connections based on trust and explicit consent. Used together, these enhancements simplify your workflow, strengthen compliance, improve deliverability, and ultimately empower you to run more effective email campaigns. Focus your efforts on genuinely interested users, measure performance accurately, and build lasting customer relationships grounded in transparency and trust. Move forward with the confidence that comes from clear metrics and confirmed consent. The post Clear Metrics, Trusted Connections: Email Marketing Easier and More Effective appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 5 minutes In today’s digital landscape, cutting through the noise to capture your customer’s attention feels like an uphill battle. Consumers are bombarded with messages daily – the average person might receive over 120 emails every single day. In this crowded space, generic, one-size-fits-all communication simply doesn’t work anymore. Customers have evolved. They don’t just want personalization; they expect it. They expect their favourite brands to understand their individual preferences, needs, and behaviours, delivering messages and experiences that feel uniquely crafted for them. Marketers often struggle to effectively leverage the wealth of customer data available to them, such as purchase history, browsing patterns, preferences, and real-time interactions, in order to create truly personalized content at scale. While possible, the traditional methods involve painstaking effort: manually creating complex segments, building countless variations of the same campaign, or worse, wrestling with complicated code and relying on technical teams. Imagine if you could bypass this complexity. What if you could automatically tailor your campaign content for every customer, making it dynamic and relevant in real-time, without the coding headaches or endless hours of work? Introducing MoEngage’s Dynamic Content Builder This is precisely where MoEngage’s Dynamic Content Builder steps in. It’s a powerful yet intuitive feature designed to democratize hyper-personalization for marketers, starting with email campaigns. At its core, the Dynamic Content Builder allows you to effortlessly personalize every element of your campaign. Think beyond just names – dynamically change body copy, images, calls-to-action (CTAs), product recommendations, and promotional offers based on individual customer attributes, behaviors, and real-time context. It empowers marketers to transform standard, static emails into unique, engaging experiences that feel handcrafted for each recipient. How does it achieve this? Through a simplified, visual drag-and-drop interface. Marketers can easily add dynamic content blocks to their campaigns and set up sophisticated conditional logic in just a few clicks – no complex coding required. You define the rules, specifying which content (like a specific image, text block, product set, or offer) should be displayed to different audience segments based on their data. The builder also allows you to set up fallback content, ensuring a seamless experience for recipients who might not match any specific condition. Solving the Personalization Puzzle with Dynamic Content Builder Dynamic Content Builder addresses key challenges modern marketers face: Rising Consumer Expectations: Customers demand relevance.Generic messages lead to campaign fatigue and low engagement.Marketers need to be equipped with tools to meet and exceed these expectations for tailored interactions. The Data Dilemma: Marketers have access to more customer data than ever – attributes, real-time event data, behavioral insights. However, activating this data effectively for personalization often remained a complex hurdle, limiting strategies to basic attribute insertions. Operational Inefficiencies and technical complexity: The traditional approach to personalization – creating numerous campaign versions for different segments or relying on technical support for dynamic coding – is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale. This inefficiency hinders marketers’ ability to deliver consistent, personalized experiences. The Need for Scalability: Personalization isn’t a one-off task; it’s an ongoing commitment. As businesses grow, the need to deliver personalized experiences consistently and efficiently becomes paramount. Essentially, MoEngage developed the Dynamic Content Builder to make sophisticated, data-driven personalization accessible and manageable for all marketers. It removes technical barriers and simplifies the process of creating truly relevant customer communications. Unlock Powerful Personalisation with Dynamic Content Builder Dynamic Content Builder brings tangible benefits to your marketing efforts and overall business goals: Conquer Hyper-Personalization, Effortlessly: The intuitive, UI-driven approach enables you marketers to implement complex conditional logic and data-driven personalization without coding, and making advanced personalization strategies achievable. Boost Efficiency: Less Effort, More Personalization: Say goodbye to the grind of creating multiple email versions for every segment. Design one email campaign that dynamically adapts its content for recipients based on their profile and behavior. Drive Higher Customer Engagement and ROI: Personalized content is relevant content. By tailoring messages, offers, and visuals to individual preferences and context, you cut through the clutter, reduce communication fatigue, and capture attention. This naturally leads to significantly higher open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and ultimately, better conversion rates and campaign performance. Simplify Campaign Management and Reduce Errors: The visual interface and guided process not only simplify creation but also minimize the risk of errors often associated with manual segmentation or complex coding. Features like attribute functions, conditional logic with fallbacks, and clear error indicators provide greater control and ensure your personalization is effective and accurate. Leverage Real-Time Data: Adapt content based on the latest customer data and interactions. For instance, if a customer recently viewed a specific product category, your next email can dynamically feature related items or offers, making your communication timely and highly relevant. Dynamic Content Builder in Action: Use Cases Across Industries The power of dynamic personalization isn’t limited to one sector. Here’s how various industries can leverage the Dynamic Content Builder: Retail & E-commerce: Location & Context-Specific Offers: Promote winter jackets to customers in colder climates and swimwear to those in warmer regions, automatically within the same campaign. You could even adjust content based on real-time local weather forecasts. Demographic & Preference-Based Messaging: Showcase work boots to someone identified as a construction worker and formal shoes to a corporate lawyer, based on profile data. Tailor product recommendations based on past purchase history or browsed categories. Loyalty Program Personalization: Dynamically display a customer’s current points balance, their tier status, or exclusive offers available only to loyalty members. Tailored Promotions: Automatically send VIP customers exclusive discount codes while offering inactive subscribers a special re-engagement incentive, all managed within a single campaign. BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, Insurance): Personalized Reward Programs: If a customer frequently redeems credit card points for travel, dynamically showcase travel-related reward options in their emails. If another prefers merchandise, highlight relevant shopping redemption opportunities. Targeted Financial Recommendations: Based on account activity (like significant balance growth) or profile attributes, dynamically suggest relevant services like investment options, premium accounts, or loan products that fit their financial situation. Seamless Onboarding: When a customer opens a new account, use dynamic content to personalize welcome messages, highlight features relevant to their chosen account type, provide location-specific information (like nearby branches or ATMs), and guide them through the initial steps. The Future is Personalized, Make it Dynamic The era of generic, batch-and-blast messaging is over. Customers expect and reward brands that recognize their individuality and provide relevant, timely, and personalized experiences. Delivering this level of personalization consistently and efficiently, has been a persistent challenge. MoEngage’s Dynamic Content Builder removes these barriers, putting the power of true, data-driven personalization directly into the hands of the marketer. By simplifying the creation of adaptive content, eliminating coding complexities, it allows you to move from static, impersonal communication to strategic, dynamic and personalized engagement. Stop wrestling with multiple campaign variations and complex code. Start building smarter, more effective campaigns that resonate deeply with customers and drive meaningful results. Unlock hyper-personalization with MoEngage’s Dynamic Content Builder. One campaign. Infinite possibilities. The post From Static to Strategic: Effortlessly Personalize Customer Experiences with MoEngage’s Dynamic Content Builder appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 8 minutes What happens when the top minds in Customer Engagement collaborate to solve the biggest challenge consumer brands face? You get MoEngage NEXT! The future of customer engagement is intelligent and deeply personalized! AI is revolutionizing marketing and transcending traditional boundaries of customer engagement. It’s moving beyond basic interactions to unlocking richer insights and building stronger customer relationships through tailored journeys and predictive engagement. In the H1 edition of MoEngage NEXT 2025, MoEngage’s CEO, Raviteja Dodda, and CPO, Nalin Goel, unveiled an array of compelling new product innovations designed to empower marketers – innovations that can enable marketers to effortlessly build precise audience segments using the power of AI with simple natural language, help marketers achieve a true 360-degree understanding of their customers by unifying fragmented data so that they can deliver richer, interactive customer experiences. These new capabilities can simplify and accelerate your campaign creation process with a centralized management hub and unlock true 1:1 personalization at scale with dynamic content and capabilities that shall make your email marketing much easier and effective. Discover how these advancements are revolutionizing customer connections and driving impactful engagement! Here’s a quick summary of our new product launches at MoEngage NEXT: 1. Revolutionizing Customer Engagement with AI-powered Smart Segmentation We understand that a well-defined segmentation is a gateway to a high-impact personalized engagement. For Marketers today, the current filter-based segmentation approach, while powerful, presents a learning curve, especially for new users. Constructing effective segments demands understanding query semantics, including rules, logic, and conditions for filtering events and attributes. Crucially, users need in-depth knowledge of the platform’s event taxonomy and available attributes to target accurately. For instance, identifying their customers who viewed a product but didn’t purchase requires selecting the correct events, applying specific filters and timeframes, and excluding purchasers. This complexity can lead to delays and errors for those unfamiliar with these intricacies. But what if marketers can simply describe their ideal audience in natural language, and AI automatically builds the segment for them without going through any of the filter-based segmentation hassles described above? Introducing Segment Assist, which enables brands to effortlessly build targeted customer segments using a simple natural language prompt rather than traditional filters to build queries. This intuitive approach drastically simplifies and accelerates the process, empowering businesses to leverage their data for precise targeting and impactful, personalized engagement at scale. Learn more about the power of Segment Assist here! 2. Unleashing seamless customer journeys effortlessly with Merlin AI Flow Assist In today’s competitive landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences hinges on creating thoughtful and cohesive multi-touch flows. These carefully orchestrated interactions guide customers seamlessly through their journey, fostering engagement and driving conversions. However, the reality of building these high-impact flows often involves a painstaking iterative process, demanding intricate conditional logic and consuming valuable time. This complexity can present a significant hurdle for marketers new to automation platforms. Not anymore! Introducing Merlin AI Flow Assist, which is engineered to shatter these barriers. Imagine transforming your customer journey ideas into fully functional, optimized flows within seconds. With Flow Assist, this vision becomes a reality. By simply articulating your desired journey as a natural language prompt, Merlin AI instantly translates your concept into a tangible, ready-to-deploy flow. Furthermore, Flow Assist acts as a powerful brainstorming partner. The AI provides tailored recommendations, sparking innovative ideas and helping you craft even more effective customer journeys. This intelligent assistance empowers marketers to rapidly prototype, test different approaches, and launch campaigns with unparalleled speed and agility. Merlin AI Flow Assist significantly accelerates the creation of customer journey flows. Automating the often intricate technical aspects of flow building liberates marketers from dealing with complex logic and configurations. This newfound efficiency allows them to dedicate more time and energy to strategic thinking, fostering creative campaign development, and gaining deeper insights into their customer needs and behaviors. The result is a streamlined workflow that enables the effortless design and implementation of impactful customer experiences. Our product teams are firing all cylinders to roll out Merlin AI Flow Assist soon. Stay tuned for more updates! 3. Unlocking deeper Customer Engagement at scale with AI-powered personalization Are your marketing campaigns feeling less like targeted outreach and more like casting a wide net? You’re likely experiencing the limitations of segment-based approaches. Grouping customers together assumes uniform preferences, leading to diluted messaging and missed opportunities to truly connect. The challenge of achieving genuine 1:1 personalization at scale – understanding individual needs, real-time context, and preferred channels – has historically been a complex, resource-intensive hurdle. Introducing Merlin AI Decisioning Agent, a game-changing solution designed to revolutionize your marketing efforts. This autonomous agent moves beyond the constraints of traditional segmentation, leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to each and every customer. By clearly defining your campaign objectives (like driving repeat purchases) and operational guardrails (such as budget limitations), Decisioning Agent acts as an intelligent orchestrator. Drawing upon comprehensive customer profiles and real-time behavioral data, the Decisioning Agent dynamically selects the most relevant product, the optimal communication channel, the most compelling message, and the precise moment to engage with each individual. But it doesn’t stop there. The Decisioning Agent continuously learns and adapts based on how customers interact with these personalized campaigns. This iterative and reinforced learning process ensures that future interactions become even more finely tuned and effective. The benefits are significant. By eliminating guesswork and moving beyond broad categorizations, you can incorporate real-time context into every decision. Merlin AI Decisioning Agent automates the intricate micro-decisions across numerous variables – product, channel, content, and timing – freeing up your marketing team to focus on strategic initiatives. Ultimately, this translates to a significant optimization of your marketing ROI, a reduction in unnecessary costs, a boost in conversion rates, and the realization of previously missed opportunities to build stronger, more meaningful customer relationships. The future of impactful marketing lies in the power of true, AI-driven personalization! Want to be a part of this ingenious product pilot? Reach out to your Customer Success manager to get you onboarded! 4. Delivering interactive and delightful customer experiences through Rich Messaging Marketers today who are grappling with the limitations of traditional SMS/MMS, including low engagement and declining consumer trust due to oversaturation, now have a powerful solution. Today’s customers expect engaging, conversational mobile interactions, and Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) for Business is designed to meet this demand. As a successor to SMS/MMS, RCS offers multimedia sharing, interactive features, and verified brand identities, creating richer and more effective communication channels. MoEngage has launched native support for RCS for Business, empowering marketers to seamlessly leverage these advanced capabilities within their platform. This integration allows for sending rich, single-card messages with verified branding, diverse media, and actionable buttons like link redirects, calls, and location sharing, significantly enhancing campaign engagement. RCS for Business also provides crucial measurable metrics such as read rates and clicks, enabling data-driven optimization. Furthermore, the flexibility to revoke messages and implement fallback options like SMS ensures consistent communication delivery and maximizes reach. This promises higher read and response rates, making RCS a potent tool for impactful customer engagement. For instance, retailers can boost sales with interactive product carousels, while financial institutions can enhance trust through secure, rich notifications. Read more about how to elevate your customer engagement with RCS! 3. Unlocking a single customer view with MoEngage Unified Identity In today’s fragmented digital landscape, marketers face a growing challenge: understanding customers across multiple devices and touchpoints. Each interaction can create a new, siloed user identity, hindering a unified view. This makes delivering consistent, personalized experiences incredibly difficult. To overcome this, marketers are increasingly seeking robust identity resolution solutions that aim to consolidate disparate data points into a single customer profile, unlocking deeper insights and enabling truly personalized engagement. Introducing MoEngage’s “Unified Identity” solution that enables brands to unify fragmented customer profiles across online and offline touchpoints, creating a single view of each customer. It ensures accurate identity resolution by matching and merging records using exact identifiers like email addresses, phone numbers, device IDs, and user IDs. By seamlessly connecting customer interactions, preferences, and attributes across devices and time, it consolidates all relevant data into a unified profile. This empowers brands to build precise segments and deliver hyper-personalized engagement, ensuring every interaction is contextually relevant and impactful. Learn more about how you can unify fragmented customer profiles with MoEngage Unified Identity here! 4. Simplifying Campaign Management with our new Template Manager Modern Marketers and Email developers manage multiple campaigns daily. They spend countless hours and effort searching for the right campaign assets, rebuilding campaign layouts for each campaign, and maintaining brand consistency and guidelines for all the assets. This typically results in delayed campaign timeliness and loss of potential engagement opportunities. But not anymore! Introducing MoEngage Template Manager – A powerful all-in-one hub for creating, organizing, and managing campaign templates With MoEngage Template Manager, Marketers can easily create beautiful campaign templates with drag-and-drop, HTML, or simply import them to the MoEngage platform via an API. They can seamlessly organize templates into folders for convenience, filter and sort them for quick discovery, share templates and best practices across teams. With MoEngage Template Manager, Markets can also preview, edit and re-use templates easily across their campaigns. They can also have a centralized view of all their template Edits with Versioning and also smartly sync their templates across different campaigns. Learn more about how you can streamline your campaign management with our new Template Manager! 5. Achieving hyper-personalization at scale with our Dynamic Content Builder In today’s overwhelming digital environment, capturing customer attention is a significant hurdle. With inboxes flooded daily, generic emails fail to resonate. Modern consumers demand personalized, timely, and relevant communications that speak directly to their individual preferences and behaviors. To forge genuine connections and boost engagement, marketers must move beyond basic personalization, leveraging the wealth of customer data available, including attributes, behaviors, and events. Addressing this critical need for scalable personalization, MoEngage introduces Dynamic Content Builder. MoEngage’s Dynamic Content Builder empowers marketers to personalize every message element based on individual attributes and behavior, from text to CTAs. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface simplifies the creation of complex conditional logic without coding. Marketers can easily display tailored content to different segments and save dynamic elements for reuse, ensuring highly resonant and efficient campaigns. Discover how you can achieve personalization at scale with our Dynamic content builder! 6. Making Email Marketing easier and effective At MoEngage, we’re constantly evolving our platform to empower marketers. Recognizing the pivotal role of Email as a Channel, we’re excited to share our latest innovations focused on enhancing your email marketing strategies. Email Bot Opens: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) poses a challenge to email marketers by obscuring open rates and IP addresses. This makes it difficult to accurately measure campaign engagement. MoEngage’s “Email Bot Opens” feature addresses this by distinguishing between genuine user opens and those generated by bots or MPP. It provides marketers with transparent metrics, including “User Opens” and an “Adjusted Open Rate,” offering a more accurate view of campaign performance across various platform dashboards, reports, flows, and segmentation options. This enables more informed strategies and better conversion tracking. Double Opt-In: Double opt-in is a best practice for email marketing, requiring users to confirm their subscription twice, thus improving GDPR compliance and email list quality. Many enterprises require a double opt-in process for email subscriptions and preference management. But Double opt-in implementation is complex and requires marketers to employ cumbersome workarounds involving external landing pages and multiple connector campaigns. This fragmented approach demands significant time and resources. The need for a native and streamlined double opt-in feature within the customer engagement platform is key to simplifying workflows, enhancing data privacy, and improving overall marketing efficiency. To address this, MoEngage introduces a streamlined “Double Opt-in for Email” feature. Marketers can utilize customizable MoEngage landing pages or their own and create automated confirmation email flows. The feature allows segmentation and targeting of only double-opted-in users, improving campaign precision and providing detailed delivery funnel insights. Learn more about how you can enrich your email marketing strategies with our latest innovations! Conclusion and next steps If you’re an existing MoEngage customer, contact your favorite account manager to get started with these new capabilities. Schedule a demo here if you’re new to MoEngage! The post MoEngage NEXT Spring 2025 Recap: Unlocking Delightful and Deeply Personalized Customer Experiences at Scale With AI appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 4 minutes The retail landscape is continuously evolving, and Shoptalk 2025 has demonstrated this evolution vividly. At the event, we caught up with Amit R. Patil, WW Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Strategy and Business Development at AWS, to share his insights on retail marketing. Here’s what he had to say: Q1: What are some of the biggest retail marketing trends that stood out at Shoptalk? How do they align with the challenges and opportunities you’re seeing with your customers? Ans: There was a lot of focus around hyper-personalization and the development of multimodal experiences throughout the event. With hyper-personalization, the goal moved beyond just using a customer’s name in an email. Its aim is to truly understand individual preferences, past behaviors, and real-time context to deliver highly relevant and tailored interactions. Secondly, multimodal experiences enable brands to engage with consumers through a variety of senses and formats. It’s not just about reading text on a website anymore. Brands are seeing a push towards richer media like video, interactive content, and even augmented reality. Utilizing these immersive experiences to capture attention and create more memorable brand interactions. While brands are embracing newer technologies that unify customer experience, only some of them have cracked the perfect customer engagement mix. This means brands are still in the early stages of seeing the full potential of these immersive strategies. Q2: How does “immersive experience” translate to in practical terms for retail marketing? Ans: A “immersive experience,” refers to the shift away from primarily text-based communication towards more engaging and visually appealing formats. Think about how users consume information in our daily lives – video is often preferred over long blocks of text. This is translating into retail marketing in significant ways. For example, landing pages are evolving to feature more dynamic visual elements. This could be product demonstration videos, interactive 360-degree product views, or shoppable videos where users can click directly on items within the video to purchase. But “multimodal” is broader than just video. It encompasses a wider range of media working together. This includes richer image-based content, more visually appealing layouts, and leveraging technologies to deliver experiences that are hyperlocal and hyper-personalized. The goal is to provide content that feels immediately relevant and contextual to the consumer in that specific moment. Imagine using an app that shows product recommendations based on your recent purchases and wishlist items, while also notifying you about price drops and discounts. That’s the kind of direction retail brands are heading in. Q3: How do you think retail brands are leveraging AI to support this move towards greater personalization and engagement? Ans: Retailers who are innovating are strategically using AI to power their personalization efforts. What’s interesting is the shift in focus. Initially, many personalization efforts were geared towards customer acquisition, like trying to attract new buyers with tailored offers. While acquisition is still important, there is a significant emphasis now on using personalization for customer retention and driving higher conversion rates amongst retail brands. AI enables brands to analyze vast amounts of customer data such as purchase history, browsing behavior, preferences, interactions across different touchpoints. This enables them to build a much more nuanced understanding of the individual customers. Based on this understanding, retailers can then deliver highly targeted product recommendations, personalized content, dynamic pricing, and even tailored customer service interactions. Brands are realizing that investing in sophisticated personalization strategies is where they get more “bang for their buck” in terms of building customer loyalty and driving sales. Q4: Omnichannel has been a buzzword for a long time in retail. How are retailers evolving their approach to delivering seamless experiences across digital and physical channels? And where are they still falling short? Ans: You’re right, “omnichannel” has been around for about a decade now. At Shoptalk, the conversation has definitely shifted around terms like “unified commerce“ or even “collaborative commerce“. This reflects a more evolved understanding of what it truly means to connect with consumers across all touchpoints. The evolution is about moving beyond simply having a presence on multiple channels like website, app, physical stores, social media. It’s about creating truly seamless touchpoints where the customer experience feels consistent and integrated, regardless of how they choose to interact with the brand. This translates to several key areas like consistent visuals across platforms, same displays online and in-store, on-brand experience everywhere and a natural consumer pathway across all channels. The ultimate goal for brands is putting the consumer at the absolute center of everything. The idea is that there should be no perceived disruption as a customer moves from browsing online to visiting a physical store and then perhaps engaging with the brand on social media later. Navigating the Evolving Retail Landscape These trends at Shoptalk point towards a future where personalized and integrated experiences are paramount in retail marketing.  Embracing richer content formats and unified channel strategies is becoming increasingly important for staying competitive and meaningfully connecting with consumers in today’s evolving retail landscape. Reach out to us if you want to chat more about Shoptalk or explore our offerings powered by AWS.   About MoEngage & AWS: MoEngage uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) and services like EC2, Kafka, Athena, SQS, Lambda, and Personalize to provide real-time customer engagement. This allows for personalized marketing in seconds and easy scaling for any size business. AWS helps MoEngage maintain a 99.99% uptime SLA in over 40 countries. MoEngage serves 1,350+ customers, manages 1.5 billion+ user profiles, and sends 4 billion+ messages daily using AWS. MoEngage has also built integration with AWS CDS (across channels such as SMS, Email, WhatsApp), to enable brands to leverage the best of capabilities around Message Orchestration, journeys, Advanced AI features to optimize marketing campaigns, while maintaining very high standards of security and deliverability at the same time. Apart from this, MoEngage recently released its Warehouse Native integration with Amazon Redshift that utilizes zero-copy data personalization. This enables customers to securely access and utilise data in Redshift directly from MoEngage, without the hassle of copying or moving it. The post Shoptalk 2025: Decoding the Future of Retail Marketing with AWS appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 14 minutes Evaluating the actual impact of automated email marketing campaigns is challenging. But that’s why email marketing metrics and KPIs exist. When you analyze these metrics, you start perceiving the success of your email campaigns differently. It sets off an endless cycle — knowing your audience, doubling down on what’s working, and creating a better email strategy than before. Because if you’re not sure whether recipients are even reading your emails, what’s the use of sending them more? Keep reading to learn how to prioritize your email campaign metrics, what each metric means, and how to improve your email marketing strategy, bit by bit.   What are Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs? Email marketing metrics are numbers that tell you how your email campaigns are performing. You learn how many customers unsubscribe, interact with your emails, or forward them to others. Such insights can help you adjust your email marketing strategy to boost customer engagement and improve ROI. Although KPIs and metrics are used interchangeably, they’re actually different. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable goals that help you stay on track to achieve overall business objectives. For example, ‘increasing conversions from email by 30%’ can be one of your KPIs for email campaigns. On the other hand, metrics measure the performance of a certain business action or process. They’re more tactical than KPIs, monitoring your performance in day-to-day operations. For instance, to measure your progress toward the above KPI, you can track email metrics like conversion rate, website traffic from email, and bounce rate. Do we need to track them, though? The answer is ‘YES’. Louder and clearer for those at the back!   Why are Email Marketing Performance Metrics Important to Track and Analyze? You should track email marketing metrics because they help you assess if your email campaigns are actually succeeding. They provide a clear vision of whether you’ve accomplished your goals on the email marketing journey. Analyzing these metrics also lets you identify areas for improvement and strive for better results in your future campaigns. 5 Benefits of Tracking Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs Email performance metrics are important to track as they help you: 1. Gain audience insights How many customers are opening your emails, clicking on the links inside, forwarding them — these aren’t just vanity metrics. From these, you’ll know what types of emails customers prefer, what they’re more interested in buying from your brand, when they’re more likely to open your emails, and so on. The more you know about your audience, the better you can tailor your emails to their needs and preferences. 2. Check the performance of your email campaigns No online marketer today can afford to send emails and then leave their performance to chance. Checking the email marketing metrics and KPIs gives you a solid picture of how your email campaigns are performing over time and affecting your subscribers. 3. Optimize your campaigns: When you check your email campaign performance metrics, you can understand where your campaigns are lagging behind and why. It helps you figure out what needs to be changed to achieve better results. For example, if not many recipients are opening your emails, consider changing your subject lines. 4. Improve your email marketing strategy You know what’s another plus point of tracking metrics for email marketing? Constantly tweaking your email marketing strategy to improve it. We know it sounds exhausting, but hear us out. The more you understand what content resonates with your subscribers, the more you can take data-driven decisions to improve your future emails. In turn, you’re taking a step closer to more subscriptions, more sales, and more revenue. 5. Share ROI reports with your leaders Finally, analyzing your email marketing KPIs means you’re not caught unaware when stakeholders ask you if your campaigns are working. (Whew!) From your team members to your leaders, everyone is on the same page. That’s all well and good. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how attention-grabbing your emails and subject lines are if you don’t know which email metrics need your attention the most.   How to Choose Which Email Metrics are Important to Track and Measure Rather than floundering in a sea of email marketing metrics, be choosy about them. That can’t happen unless you’re clear about your email campaign KPIs and goals, too. If you ask us, there’s no better way to set goals than using the SMART framework. It’s useful, easy to remember, and can ultimately help streamline your goal and metric-setting process. That said, let’s look at the SMART qualities you should look for when selecting email performance metrics and email KPIs to track: Specific: The goals for each email marketing campaign should be very clear and specific. Simply ‘growing your email list’, for instance, sounds vague. Gaining more email subscribers by increasing your Instagram ad budget on retail product categories that’ve historically acquired the most subscribers — now that’s a specific goal. The more well-defined your email marketing goal is, the better you can focus your efforts and avoid confusion. Measurable: Make your email marketing goals quantifiable to track your progress. Attaching numbers to your goals helps ensure they’re more concrete. Taking the above example, it doesn’t help if you just want to ‘gain more email subscribers’. Can you achieve your business objective if your email list grows by 20%? Or would a 10% increase do the job just fine? Achievable: Setting unrealistic goals for your campaigns would only make you feel frustrated. If your goal is to acquire 20% more email subscribers, is it reasonable, given the time and resources available? Do your historical email marketing data support such a goal? Let’s say your email subscriptions have increased by 10% since you started using the same tactic 3 months ago. This warrants setting a goal to gain 20% more subscribers. Now that’s one of your email marketing campaign KPIs! Relevant: If your goals aren’t even remotely related to driving conversions, increasing sales, or whatever your brand’s overall business objectives are, it’s not worth pursuing those goals. Increasing the number of email subscribers, for instance, will help you boost brand awareness and drive more leads. Timely: To prioritize your efforts, establish a certain timeframe for achieving your goals. Besides creating a sense of urgency, it helps you stay on track and set clear expectations for your team and your stakeholders. Ensure the deadlines are realistic, though. In the above example, because you’ve seen 10% increase in your email subscriptions in 3 months, a realistic timeline to achieve 20% growth would also be 3 months (depending on your resources). Bring all these goals together, and voilà! Here’s what your SMART goal looks like: ‘We want to acquire 20% more email subscribers in 3 months by increasing our Instagram ad budget on retail product categories that have historically acquired the most email subscribers.’ Now, pick the email marketing metrics that align closely with your SMART goal. Speaking of the above SMART goal, the metrics you need to measure include your unsubscribe rate, list growth rate, and email forwarding rate. And there’s plenty more where that came from, as you’ll see next.   13 Top Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs to Track Campaign Performance You won’t know which email campaign metrics to track without understanding what each email KPI means and which metrics matter the most to your brand. So here you go. 1. Open Rate Email open rate measures the number of email recipients that open an email. It’s one of the most common email marketing metrics. How to Calculate: Divide the number of emails opened by the number of emails delivered. Then multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: Just think — when do you open an email? After reading its subject line, right? The more enticing your subject lines are, the more emails get opened. So, open rate is a way of gauging whether or not your subject lines are engaging enough. It also signals whether your content is interesting enough for your customers. When sending emails to the same audience, keep reviewing changes in the open rate to identify engagement patterns. For example, suppose two emails to the same audience and containing similar content have different open rates. If their subject lines are different, you’ll know which one your audience liked more — the one leading to a higher open rate. How to Improve Your Email Open Rate: Use personalization in your subject lines and experiment with different ones. Don’t make them sound salesy. Also, send emails at different times to understand when your subscribers are most likely to open the emails. There are so many other ways to increase your email open rate! 2. Click-to-open Rate (CTOR) Email click-to-open rate (CTOR) measures the number of email recipients that click on any link inside your email after opening it. How to Calculate: Divide the number of recipients who clicked on a link inside an email by the number of emails opened. Multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: Email CTOR reveals how effective your email copy is in inducing recipients to click on a link or button in the email. If your email doesn’t meet the expectations set by your subject line, recipients aren’t likely to click on any link. It’s one of the most crucial email engagement metrics. How to Improve Your Email CTOR: Ensure your subject lines tell the recipients what to expect after opening your emails. Your call-to-action (CTA) link or button inside your email should also be clearly visible across all devices. Use a strong and actionable CTA — ‘Join our community of 350+ dog owners’ is more click-worthy than ‘Click here to sign up’. Don’t forget to check if the links inside the email are clickable and are directing recipients to the right destination. 3. Conversion Rate Email conversion rate measures the number of recipients who take a desired action after getting your email. The action may be downloading an ebook, filling out a form, buying a product, reading a blog post, or anything else you want your customers to do. How to Calculate: Divide the number of recipients who performed the desired action by the number of emails received. Multiply that result by 100. How to Use It: Conversion rate gives you an idea of whether your email campaigns are encouraging subscribers to take action. Keep tracking the email marketing performance metrics over time and compare them to understand what works for your audience. How to Improve Your Conversion Rate: Make sure your emails provide useful and relevant content to your audience. Experiment with different email sending times before automating them. Add compelling CTAs in your emails and include discount offers in your subject lines. 4. Bounce Rate Email bounce rate shows the number of emails that haven’t been delivered to the recipient. How to Calculate: Divide the number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent. Multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: Bounce rate indicates that the recipient’s email server has rejected the email, and so it’s returned to you. This happens when the recipient’s email address is invalid or doesn’t exist. Or, the recipient’s email server might be down or their inbox could be full. A high bounce rate can hurt your sender reputation. It also hints that the quality of your email list could be low. How to Improve Your Bounce Rate: Clean your email list of all inactive and unengaged subscribers. Use a double-opt-in process to ensure all your subscribers are genuinely interested in receiving your emails. 5. Deliverability Rate Email deliverability rate shows the number of emails that successfully land in the recipients’ inboxes. How to Calculate: Divide the number of emails delivered by the number of emails sent. Multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: A high email deliverability rate indicates a good sender reputation. Because recipients don’t report your emails as ‘spam’, a high deliverability rate also signals that your email copy is useful for your audience. But a low rate might suggest there are problems with your email server or with your email list’s quality. How to Improve Your Deliverability Rate: Set a reminder to regularly clean your email list. Don’t overwhelm recipients with too many emails over a short time period. That might lead them to mark your emails as ‘spam’, delete the emails, or worse, unsubscribe. Also, try using a reputable email service provider (ESP). 6. Unsubscribe Rate Email unsubscribe rate indicates the number of recipients who choose to leave your email list. How to Calculate: Divide the number of people who unsubscribed by the number of emails delivered. Multiply that number by 100. How to Use It: Unsubscribe rates can be both good and bad. The bad part is, recipients who unsubscribe tell you they don’t want your emails anymore. It might be because they don’t find your emails engaging or relevant enough for their problems. But the good thing is that by unsubscribing from your emails, recipients clean your email list for you. A high unsubscribe rate may also mean that your audience hasn’t been segmented properly. Or that you’re sending too many emails too soon. To get to the bottom of the reason, send an unsubscribe confirmation email to people who’ve recently unsubscribed. Ask them why they left your subscriber list. How to Improve Your Unsubscribe Rate: Segment your subscribers into different email audience groups, based on their interests, behavior, preferences, age groups, or locations (whatever works). Then, hit each audience segment with targeted emails providing information that’s interesting and valuable to that segment. You can also ask recipients what kinds of emails they want to receive, and how often. 7. List Growth Rate List growth rate is the rate at which you’re adding more and more subscribers to your email list. How to Calculate: Subtract the number of unsubscribes from the number of new subscribers. Divide that result by the number of total subscribers. Then, multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: You need to keep growing your email list for more selling opportunities. A negative list growth rate means you should find new subscribers, and keep your existing subscribers engaged so they don’t leave your list. How to Improve Your List Growth Rate: Attract more subscribers with incentives for joining your email list. Allow customers to sign up for your emails easily through forms on your website. Place clear and compelling CTAs on your landing pages. 8. Spam Complaint Rate Email spam complaint rate is the percentage of recipients who report your email as ‘spam’. How to Calculate: Divide the number of emails marked ‘spam’ by the number of emails sent. Multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: This is one of the most essential email marketing metrics. It reveals whether recipients see your emails as annoying or irrelevant. Customers who don’t remember or know your brand may also send you spam complaints. The more spam complaints you receive, the more likely your emails are to end up in customers’ spam folders instead of inboxes. So, keep your spam complaint rate lower than 0.1%. How to Improve Your Email Spam Complaint Rate: For starters, don’t send emails to people who haven’t opted in to receive them. Additionally, make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe from your emails. If they can’t find any ‘unsubscribe’ link or button in your email, they’re more likely to get frustrated and mark it as spam. Your subject lines should not sound spammy, either. 9. Forward Rate / Email Sharing Email forward rate indicates how many recipients forward your emails to others by clicking the ‘Forward’ button or link in their email client. How to Calculate: Divide the number of recipients who forwarded or shared the email, by the number of emails delivered. Multiply the result by 100. How to Use It: Simply put, forward rate tells you whether your emails are share-worthy. People are more likely to share your emails with their friends and family members if they’re helpful, interesting, and visually appealing. Remember, a high forward rate means you have several brand advocates. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily translate into more email subscribers. But the people to whom your emails have been forwarded might read them or click on a link to take the desired action — you never know! How to Improve Your Email Forward Rate: Make forwarding your emails easy for the recipients. You can also ask them outright to forward or share the emails with a clear CTA. Browse online for topics and posts your customers generally share, then include expert tips and other valuable info related to those topics in your emails. Don’t forget to have eye-catching email designs ready. 10. Revenue Per Email (RPE) Revenue per email (RPE) shows you how profitable and successful your individual emails are. How to Calculate: Divide the revenue generated in your email campaign, by the total number of emails sent. How to Use It: You can use RPE to assess which types of emails (newsletters, promotional emails, welcome emails, and so on) have driven the most revenue. A low revenue per email would mean your email copy and CTAs haven’t resonated with the recipients. As a result, it reveals which email marketing campaigns and strategies have been the most effective so far. Then, you get an idea of the budget you should set for your future campaigns. Keep in mind that the RPE should be close to the amount you invested in each email. To find out your individual email investment, divide the total amount invested in a campaign by the number of emails sent. How to Improve Your RPE: Segment your email list based on different criteria. Your email copy and CTAs should be relevant to each of your audience segments. Run A/B testing for your subject lines, copy, CTAs, and designs to understand what works better in terms of email engagement. The more engagement your emails get, the more likely they are to increase the revenue. 11. Revenue Per Subscriber (RPS) Revenue per subscriber (RPS) assesses how much revenue every active email subscriber is driving. How to Calculate: Divide the total revenue generated from emails by the number of active email subscribers. How to Use It: To track this email marketing KPI, look at the value brought by all of your active subscribers — even those you don’t always send emails to. It helps you understand which audience segment is and isn’t leading to revenue. Accordingly, you’ll know which segments to focus on more than the others. How to Improve Your RPS: Don’t ignore the audience segments that are driving little to no revenue. Double-down on your efforts in making your emails more interesting and useful for those segments. If that doesn’t work, see if you’ve used the right criteria to segment your audience. It’s one of the most common email marketing mistakes. A/B test various email copy, subject lines, CTAs, and design styles (not all at once) to check what helps increase email engagement and, in turn, revenue. 12. Subscriber Acquisition Cost (SAC) Email subscriber acquisition cost (SAC) indicates the average cost of gaining a new subscriber. How to Calculate: Divide your ad or marketing cost by the number of new email subscribers. How to Use It: SAC is one of the most useful email campaign metrics for marketers who run giveaways or paid ads. It basically tells you how effective your ad campaigns are for turning people into email subscribers. Knowing how much you’re spending on acquiring every email subscriber can help you set a more realistic marketing budget and allocate resources more effectively. Compare your SAC to past costs for subscribers acquired and to industry benchmarks. If your SAC is high, try reducing it to save your bucks. But a low SAC might also mean that the quality of your subscribers is low, or that you haven’t invested enough. How to Improve Your SAC: Better segment your email subscribers and customize your email messaging to each segment. Create emails that address your subscribers’ needs, not your brand’s. Consistently delivering valuable content helps build trust and loyalty. These subscribers can then share the emails with others, who might also become your new subscribers. 13. Email Subscriber Lifetime Value (LTV) Email subscriber lifetime value (LTV) indicates the estimated revenue a subscriber might generate during the time period when they stay on your email list. How to Calculate: Multiply your monthly revenue per subscriber (RPS) by the average number of days/weeks/months/years for which a subscriber stays on your email list. How to Use It: Your LTV should be higher than your subscriber acquisition cost (SAC). That’s how you’ll know your acquisition strategies are paying off. This metric also tells you how much more or less you should invest in acquiring new subscribers. It helps you set essential KPIs for email marketing. How to Improve Your LTV: It’s like singing the same tune over and over again — but engagement is the name of the game. Personalize your emails and provide more offers and promos to give more value to your subscribers. You can also try upselling by sending emails about related products to the subscribers.   Use the Right Platform to Track Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs No matter what email marketing metrics and KPIs you’ve chosen to track, it all boils down to having the right platform by your side. Make sure it lets you build, customize, and send emails at scale, along with analyzing their performance. And, of course, it must be easy to use. MoEngage, for example, is an email marketing automation platform that shows you everything in one place. It automatically monitors the delivery, conversion, engagement, and retention metrics for every email sent and campaign set up. Basically, you can see: How many emails were delivered How many of them bounced How many were opened How many were clicked on How many got marked ‘spam’ How many recipients unsubscribed, and lots more besides The platform comes with everything you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your automated email campaigns, and determine customer engagement patterns. Want the same results for your email campaigns? Take a 100% personalized demo of MoEngage today. The post Top 13 Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs You Should Track appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Artificial Intelligence is transforming marketing, yet many marketers struggle to separate genuine opportunities from the surrounding hype.  In a recent fireside chat, guest speaker Rusty Warner, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, and Ravi Dodda, CEO of MoEngage, tackled this challenge head-on, exploring actionable AI use cases, the critical role of data, and how to leverage AI for lasting business impact. Get the details from their conversation in this recap.   Cutting Through the AI Hype: Key Use Cases in Marketing AI is everywhere, but understanding its real-world applications can feel daunting. Rusty Warner introduced Forrester’s practical framework, outlining five key AI use cases in marketing: 1. Employee Support Agents (So Hot Right Now) The most immediate and prevalent AI application today is employee support agents, digital assistants, or copilots. These tools simplify everyday marketing tasks through natural language interfaces, facilitating content creation, segmentation, and workflow automation. “Employee support agents are hot right now. They’re already in production across sectors like retail, hospitality, media, and even regulated industries like financial services and insurance,” Warner explained. 2. Enterprise Automation Agents (Gaining Momentum) Another critical area is enterprise automation agents, or “TuringBots,” designed to automate routine business functions like data migration, forecasting, and supply chain management.  Warner highlighted significant traction, especially in retail and consumer goods. However, adoption in regulated sectors like financial services is slower due to compliance complexities. 3. Consumer Engagement Agents (Emerging & Exciting) Warner spotlighted consumer engagement agents, AI-driven chatbots delivering intuitive, conversational self-service experiences, as an exciting area beginning to take off. “We’re starting to see AI chatbots empower brands to engage customers conversationally and effectively,” Warner shared, noting ongoing experimentation despite limited full-scale deployments. Two additional future-oriented categories, fiduciary agents for governance and consumer agents acting as digital doubles, round out the AI landscape, though Warner noted these are further down the line.   Generative AI’s Current Impact in Marketing The practical potential of generative AI is already evident, especially in content creation and operational efficiencies: Content Creation: Generative AI rapidly creates initial drafts, production-ready content, and multiple variations for optimization testing. Complex Task Simplification: Marketers increasingly use generative AI’s natural language capabilities to streamline audience segmentation, interpret analytics, and receive proactive optimization recommendations. Operational Efficiency: AI aids in aligning budgets, scheduling campaigns, and preparing creative briefs, significantly enhancing productivity. Warner emphasized that these current benefits set the stage for deeper integration with customer feedback and real-time data to align marketing activities with actual customer journeys.   Data: The Essential Foundation for AI Success AI is powerful, but its effectiveness hinges on one critical element: data. Warner and Dodda both highlighted the necessity of having a robust, unified customer profile spanning all organizational functions, not just marketing. Collaboration with IT is essential to break down data silos and enable seamless integration. “AI is only as good as the data it uses,” Warner emphasized. He further stressed the growing importance of zero-party data, information explicitly shared by customers, which enhances personalization and trust. Dodda echoed this sentiment, stating, “We see many of our customers investing heavily in data platforms and strategies. Without high-quality data and unified customer profiles, achieving meaningful results from AI is challenging.”   Managing Change: Organizational Readiness and AI The successful integration of AI into marketing demands significant organizational change. Dodda and Warner discussed how workflows must evolve, highlighting the importance of managing change, obtaining buy-in from legal and creative teams, and fostering collaboration across departments. “People inherently resist change,” Warner noted. “Making AI part of everyday workflows can ease this transition, but broader governance and strategic alignment remain critical.” Dodda reinforced this point, adding, “AI can significantly augment human intelligence, giving marketers and product teams ‘superpowers’ to make better, faster, and more data-driven decisions.”   Short-Term Efficiency vs. Long-Term Impact Dodda and Warner stressed the dual impact of AI: short-term efficiency gains and significant long-term value creation. Short-Term: AI boosts immediate productivity, streamlining campaign creation and orchestration, freeing resources for strategic tasks. Long-Term: Beyond efficiency, AI enables deeper customer understanding and effective personalization, directly driving higher engagement, conversions, and revenue. Long-term, Warner predicts an even greater impact as AI empowers marketers to shift from a revenue-only mindset to a profit-focused approach, aligning marketing directly with broader business goals. “AI will transform marketing into a profit center, not just a cost center,” Warner explained. “Customer lifetime value becomes a strategic profit calculation, aligning marketing closer to CEO and CFO priorities.” Dodda added, “Brands that effectively leverage AI won’t just improve short-term campaign efficiency; they’ll fundamentally enhance customer understanding, build trust, and drive long-term profitability.”   Closing Thoughts & Next Steps AI isn’t a distant future; it’s here now, offering marketers powerful tools to enhance efficiency, deepen customer relationships, and fundamentally redefine their strategic impact. MoEngage, as highlighted by Ravi Dodda, positions itself as a partner for brands ready to leverage AI strategically, not only improving immediate campaign performance but establishing a robust foundation for enduring customer engagement and long-term profitability. Curious to explore these insights further? Watch the full webinar on-demand and learn directly from these industry leaders.   The post Breaking the AI Hype Cycle: Webinar Recap appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 11 minutes Imagine a world where your neighborhood Kirana store owner can compete with global E-commerce giants. Where an artisan in a remote village can showcase their craft to millions. Where technology isn’t just a tool, but a great equalizer. Sounds like a utopian dream? Not anymore, as it’s the emerging reality of Indian digital commerce. Here are some numbers that tell a story: By the end of 2025, India will have: 900 million smartphone users (up from 500 million in 2022) 55% of its population under 30 $111 billion digital economy by 2024 (NASSCOM Report, 2023)  But behind this transformation lies a bigger challenge—how do brands truly engage with customers in a digital-first world? This very question took center stage in a recent conversation with Sandeep Varaganti, CEO of JioMart, where he unpacked what it really takes to bridge the gap between technology and meaningful customer connections.   His insights shed light on how brands must rethink engagement, moving beyond transactions to building lasting relationships. Let’s dive in. The Fragmented Customer Journey: Where Traditional Approaches Fall Short  Picture this: A decade ago, online shopping felt like science fiction in India. There was slow internet, skeptical shopkeepers, and a massive trust deficit. Ordering something online was like attempting a complex math problem blindfolded. Fast-forward to today—we’ve gone from 1% e-commerce penetration to nearly 5%, racing towards 10%. More than just growth, this is a cultural uprising, powered by smartphones, ambition, and a uniquely Indian spirit of jugaad.  The Real Game-Changer is Customer Engagement But here’s the million-dollar question: In this digital tsunami, how do brands actually connect?  It’s not about technology. It’s about conversation. It’s about making every customer feel like they’re walking into their favorite local store, even when they’re scrolling on a smartphone.  The Connectivity Conundrum  A decade ago, Sandeep Varaganti vividly recalls the harsh realities of digital commerce in India: No reliable internet in key business regions Low technological sophistication among sellers Massive trust deficit among consumers Extreme difficulty in convincing businesses to go digital  “When we were onboarding small and medium businesses to sell online,” Sandeep shares, “it used to be challenging. There was no fast internet in the places where they operated, and the technological sophistication of these sellers and retailers was not very high.”  These challenges set the stage for a profound reimagining of how businesses could connect with customers.  The Multichannel Challenge As the digital landscape evolved, so did the approach to customer connection. JioMart’s secret? They didn’t just build an E-commerce platform. They built a digital relationship engine.    The thing is— a customer doesn’t just want to buy. They want to be understood. They want an experience that feels personal, immediate, and seamless. Whether they’re clicking through WhatsApp or walking into a physical store, the experience should be identical. This vision of seamless interaction directly addresses the fragmentation that once plagued Indian digital commerce. The Scale of Transformation The challenges of connectivity gave birth to a new understanding of customer engagement. Consider the critical pain points that need solving: Inconsistent pricing between online and offline channels Disconnected inventory management Lack of personalized customer communication Inefficient logistics and delivery experiences With smartphone penetration jumping from 20-30 crores to 60-70 crores, and E-commerce penetration growing from near-zero to nearly 5%, the landscape has dramatically transformed. And that’s where the real magic of modern customer engagement begins. The solution isn’t about more technology. It’s about smarter, more human technology that understands the nuanced needs of Indian consumers – a technology that bridges gaps, not creates them.  So, what does this all mean? The digital commerce revolution in India isn’t just about numbers or technological advancements—it’s about a radical shift in how businesses and consumers connect. It’s about breaking traditional barriers and redefining customer relationships in a way that feels personal, seamless, and, most importantly, human. And JioMart? It’s not just playing the game; it’s rewriting the rules. Let’s unpack how.  Building Real Customer Relationships Beyond Transactions For years, digital commerce in India was mostly about transactions—click, buy, deliver. But as Sandeep Varaganti puts it, “It’s not just about selling products online. It’s about making sure customers feel connected, whether they’re on WhatsApp, inside a store, or browsing an app.”  Think about it. People don’t wake up thinking, “Let me engage with an e-commerce platform today.” They think, “I need fresh vegetables, a new phone, and this delivered fast.” The brands that get this—that move beyond pushing products to actually understanding how people shop and what they expect—are the ones that thrive. JioMart is proving that customer engagement isn’t about forcing people onto a platform. It’s about meeting them where they already are.  How JioMart is Making Digital Feel Personal Breaking the Online vs. Offline Barrier “Customers don’t think in channels. They just want convenience.” If a shopper buys from JioMart online today, they shouldn’t feel like they’ve entered a different world when they walk into a Reliance Smart store tomorrow. That’s why JioMart ensures pricing, inventory, and offers stay consistent across both worlds. WhatsApp Commerce: Shopping Without the Extra Steps “People don’t want to download another app; they just want to shop where they already are.”  And where are they? WhatsApp.  With over 500 million WhatsApp users in India, JioMart lets people browse, order, and track deliveries—all within a simple chat. No friction, no extra steps. Just shopping the way it should be. Sandeep revealed that: “We are by far the largest E-commerce setup leveraging WhatsApp, and the growth rates have been significant. In just six months, the size of the business grew nine to ten times.” Personalized Shopping at Scale India isn’t a one-size-fits-all market. A customer in Bangalore doesn’t shop the same way as someone in Patna. JioMart taps into AI-driven insights to recommend products based on location, shopping history, and even seasonal trends. The goal? Make shopping feel like it’s been tailored just for you. This is more than E-commerce. It’s about bringing back the personal touch that digital shopping lost. And the brands that understand this shift will be the ones that win.  The Engagement Equation Imagine a world where: Customers don’t just buy products They have conversations They feel understood Every interaction feels like a personalized interaction This is where customer data and engagement platforms (or CDEPs) like MoEngage become game-changers. By providing intelligent, context-aware engagement tools, brands can transform generic interactions into meaningful conversations. Trust: The Biggest Currency in Digital Commerce No matter how advanced digital commerce becomes, one truth remains: People buy from brands they trust. In India, this trust isn’t built overnight—it’s earned through reliability, consistency, and a genuine connection with customers. Sandeep puts it perfectly:  “The conversational flow is crucial for Indian consumers. They want to feel there’s an interaction, not just a transactional, technologically driven experience” Think about it—what makes someone return to a brand? It’s not “discounts”. It’s not flashy ads. It’s the experience. The confidence that their order will arrive on time. The ease of getting help when something goes wrong. The feeling that they’re valued, not just another transaction. The Pillars of Meaningful Customer Engagement Seamless, Real-Time Communication: The best customer experiences don’t wait. Whether it’s a price drop, a restocked item, or an abandoned cart, engagement needs to happen in the moment. Brands that get this right don’t just send generic push notifications; they send context-aware, personalized messages that actually add value. Proactive Problem-Solving: Engagement isn’t just about selling—it’s about being there before the customer even realizes they need help. Imagine ordering groceries, and before you even check the delivery status, you get a message: Your order is running 10 minutes late, but we’ve added a ₹50 credit for the inconvenience. That’s how trust is built. Hyper-Personalization at Scale: Customers today expect experiences tailored to them—not based on broad segments but on individual behavior. This goes beyond just knowing their name. It’s about understanding their preferences, shopping habits, and even when they’re most likely to engage. The Role of Intelligent Engagement Platforms To achieve this level of personalization and real-time engagement, brands are turning to platforms like MoEngage, which enable businesses to connect with customers across multiple touchpoints, analyze behavior, and deliver truly relevant experiences at scale. At the end of the day, customer engagement is not about technology—it’s about making customers feel heard, understood, and valued. The brands that master this will not only win sales but will earn something far more valuable—loyalty.  From Transactions to Relationships: The Evolution of Customer Loyalty For years, businesses measured success by how many people bought something. But the real question isn’t who buys today—it’s who keeps coming back? Acquiring a customer is one thing, but retaining them—that’s where real value is created. The brands that win are the ones that think beyond transactions and focus on relationships.  The Death of One-Size-Fits-All Loyalty Traditional loyalty programs—points, cashback, discounts—aren’t enough anymore. Customers don’t just want rewards; they want recognition and relevance. Think about it: A repeat buyer shouldn’t get the same generic offers as a first-time visitor. A high-value customer shouldn’t have to wait in line for support. A loyal shopper should be rewarded in ways that feel personal, not just programmatic. Building Emotional Loyalty: The New Competitive Edge It’s not just about how much people buy—it’s about how they feel when they engage with your brand. Emotional loyalty comes from:  Anticipating Needs, Not Just Reacting The best brands don’t wait for customers to reach out—they predict needs before they arise. Imagine opening an app and seeing a pre-curated cart with your frequently bought items, saving you the hassle of searching. That’s thoughtful engagement. Creating Habit-Forming Experiences Think about why people instinctively check WhatsApp, Instagram, or even their favorite shopping app. It’s not just utility—it’s habit. Brands that consistently provide value, whether through useful content, timely offers, or seamless service, become part of a customer’s routine.  Trust-Driven Engagement, Not Just Generic Marketing Customers today are hyper-aware of brands that over-communicate or push irrelevant offers. The key is to engage at the right moment, with the right message—whether it’s a restock alert, an exclusive drop, or a simple thank you after a purchase.  How Leading Brands Are Cracking the Loyalty Code With AI-driven insights and automation, CDEPs like MoEngage are helping brands understand individual customer journeys and tailor experiences accordingly. This isn’t just about selling better—it’s about building lasting connections that turn first-time buyers into lifelong customers.  And in a market as competitive as India, loyalty isn’t given—it’s earned. Actionable Playbook: How Brands Can Drive Meaningful Customer Engagement It’s easy to talk about engagement, but what actually works? Here’s a clear breakdown of what brands need to do to turn casual buyers into lifelong customers. 1. Go Beyond Personalization—Deliver Relevance Don’t: Blast generic discounts to every user. Do: Use behavioral data to send the right offer at the right time. Example: Instead of a mass email saying “20% off sitewide!”, send a personalized notification: “Hey [Name], your favorite [product] is back in stock—grab it now with an exclusive 10% discount just for you!” 2. Meet Customers Where They Are Don’t: Rely only on one platform (like email or an app). Do: Engage across WhatsApp, SMS, push notifications, and even in-store experiences. Sandeep Varaganti puts it best: “Customers don’t think in channels. Whether they’re on WhatsApp, a website, or a physical store, they expect a seamless experience.” Translation? A customer should be able to: Start their journey on WhatsApp Browse on the app Complete their purchase in-store—all without friction. 3. Make Every Interaction Feel Like a Conversation Don’t: Spam customers with robotic messages. Do: Use conversational engagement that feels human. Example: Instead of a cold “Your order is shipped” message, try: “Good news, [Name]! Your order is on the way. Need any help? Reply here!” A slight shift in tone makes the difference between yet another notification and a brand people trust. 4. Prioritize Retention Over Acquisition Don’t: Spend 10x more on acquiring new customers than keeping existing ones. Do: Focus on repeat purchases, engagement loops, and long-term relationships. Winning brands don’t stop after the first sale—they keep the momentum going through: Replenishment reminders (“It’s been 30 days since your last purchase—need a refill?”) VIP customer perks (“You’ve shopped with us 5 times! Here’s an early-access pass to our new collection.”) Post-purchase engagement (“How did you like your order? Share your feedback and get a surprise gift!”) 5. Automate, But Keep It Human Don’t: Over-rely on AI without human oversight. Do: Use automation for efficiency, but humanize every touchpoint. Platforms like MoEngage help brands analyze customer behavior and trigger real-time engagement—whether it’s a reminder, a special offer, or even just a “Hey, we miss you” nudge. Because at the end of the day, loyalty isn’t built on transactions—it’s built on trust. How MoEngage Powers Intelligent Customer Engagement Now that we’ve covered the “what” and “how” of customer engagement, let’s talk about execution. Knowing what needs to be done is one thing, but actually implementing it—at scale—is where most brands struggle. This is where MoEngage comes in.   Imagine a system that doesn’t just send messages but actually understands customer behavior, anticipates needs, and drives action in real time. That’s the power MoEngage brings to modern brands. 1. Data-Driven Personalization (At Scale, Not Just in Theory) Most brands talk about personalization but fail at execution. Sending someone their first name in an email isn’t personalization—understanding their behavior and tailoring experiences is. MoEngage’s AI-powered segmentation allows brands to: Identify customer preferences based on real-time behavior. Send personalized recommendations at the right time. Optimize campaigns with AI-driven insights (not just guesswork). For example, if a customer browses a pair of sneakers but doesn’t buy, MoEngage can automatically: Send them a WhatsApp reminder with a limited-time offer. Push a notification with user reviews to build trust. Trigger a discount email after 48 hours if they haven’t purchased. The result? Higher conversions, lower drop-offs, and a seamless shopping experience. 2. Omnichannel Engagement: Meet Customers Where They Are Like Sandeep Varaganti said, “Customers don’t think in channels.” Whether they’re on WhatsApp, email, an app, or a website, the experience should feel connected. MoEngage enables brands to: Engage across multiple platforms without silos. Create automated workflows that trigger messages based on real-time actions. Ensure consistency so customers get the same experience no matter how they interact. Example: A customer adds an item to the cart on a brand’s website, but doesn’t complete the purchase. Instead of sending only an email reminder, MoEngage triggers a WhatsApp message and a push notification, creating multi-touchpoint engagement. 3. AI-Driven Insights: Optimize What Works (And Fix What Doesn’t) The biggest mistake brands make is blindly running campaigns without knowing what’s working. MoEngage’s insight-driven engagement helps brands: Analyze campaign performance in real-time. Identify where users drop off and fix bottlenecks. Automatically A/B test messaging to improve results. With these insights, brands don’t just send messages—they send the right messages that actually convert. 4. Retention-Focused Automation: Keep Customers Coming Back Acquiring new customers is expensive. Retaining them? That’s where the real revenue lies. MoEngage helps brands build intelligent retention loops with: Predictive analytics—identifying at-risk customers before they churn. Replenishment reminders—nudging customers at the right moment. Loyalty-driven engagement—rewarding repeat buyers with personalized perks. Final Thoughts: Customer Engagement Isn’t a Tactic—It’s the Growth Engine At this point, it’s clear that brands that still treat customer engagement as a checkbox are already falling behind. The days of mass-blasting promotions and hoping something sticks are long gone. Today, it’s about timing, context, and making every interaction feel personal. And the brands winning in this space? They’re not just selling; they’re building trust at every touchpoint. They understand that customers don’t want to be chased—they want to be understood. That’s where MoEngage comes in. It’s not just about pushing notifications or automating campaigns—it’s about helping brands truly listen, anticipate needs, and create moments that matter. Whether it’s personalized recommendations, seamless omnichannel journeys, or AI-driven insights, MoEngage ensures that every engagement feels natural, relevant, and frictionless. Because at the end of the day, growth isn’t about more ads or bigger budgets—it’s about how well you connect with the people who matter most: your customers.  The post Transforming E-commerce: How JioMart is Pioneering the Future of Retail in India appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 4 minutes This blog article is part of the series, The ChangeMakers, which aims to breakdown the pain points and address them using insights-led, actionable strategies. Building strong customer relationships through meaningful engagement is paramount for success in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. This is especially true in India’s competitive financial services and insurance sectors. Leading financial and insurance brands increasingly recognize the need to move beyond traditional marketing approaches to deliver personalized and seamless experiences across all customer touchpoints. However, many still face significant challenges that hinder their ability to achieve true customer-centricity. This article explores the common hurdles some of the biggest players face in the Indian financial and insurance markets and how a modern customer engagement platform like MoEngage can provide effective solutions. Key Challenges Hindering Effective Customer Engagement for Financial and Insurance Brands Several recurring pain points impede the efforts of major financial and insurance institutions in India to optimize their marketing strategies and enhance customer engagement: 1. Siloed Systems and Fragmented Data Many organizations struggle with disjointed marketing systems that operate in isolation. This lack of integration leads to data silos, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of the customer and deliver consistent messaging across channels. For instance, one of the leading mutual fund houses relied on separate systems for email campaigns without a unified performance marketing setup, hindering effective segmentation. Similarly, major insurance brands often manage web and app engagement through multiple tools, preventing the creation of centralized customer profiles and leading to fragmented customer experiences. 2. Manual and Time-Consuming Processes Reliance on manual workflows for campaign management and customer interactions consumes valuable marketing bandwidth and reduces overall productivity. The absence of robust automation tools makes it challenging to personalize customer journeys and streamline routine tasks like email campaigns and notifications. This can slow down campaign execution and time-to-market for new products and offers. 3. Limitations in Personalization and Segmentation Without integrated solutions and advanced analytics, brands face difficulties in segmenting their audience effectively and delivering personalized messaging. Basic segmentation capabilities prevent granular targeting based on customer behavior and preferences, resulting in generic communications that lack relevance and impact. One of the biggest insurance brands noted the lack of dynamic personalization on their website, leading to missed conversion opportunities for users who drop off mid-journey. 4. Heavy IT Dependency Managing customer communications often requires substantial involvement from IT departments, slowing down campaign execution and reducing marketing team agility. The absence of user-friendly, low-code, or no-code solutions restricts marketers’ ability to create and launch campaigns independently. 5. Challenges in Mobile App Engagement Despite having a mobile presence, some of the most prominent insurance players struggle with low mobile app adoption and engagement. Generic and intrusive push notifications can lead to customer churn and hinder retention efforts. Discover how your insurance brand can revive revenue by transforming renewals: 6. Cost and Complexity of Integration Concerns about the cost of implementing new automation tools and the complexity of integrating them with existing infrastructure are significant considerations for many organizations. The desire for solutions that are easy to implement and offer a strong return on investment is paramount. 7. Security and Compliance Handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII) necessitates robust security measures and compliance with industry standards. Brands need assurance that their marketing automation platform can safeguard customer data effectively. The Solution: A Unified Customer Engagement Platform for Financial and Insurance Brands To overcome these multifaceted challenges and unlock the potential of customer engagement, leading financial and insurance brands are increasingly turning to comprehensive marketing automation platforms like MoEngage. Such platforms offer a centralized hub for managing customer interactions across various channels, leveraging data and AI to deliver personalized experiences at scale. MoEngage provides a powerful solution by: 1. Enabling Seamless Integration MoEngage’s ability to integrate seamlessly with existing CRM and other systems eliminates data silos and creates a unified view of the customer. This allows for segmentation and personalization based on accurate, real-time information. 2. Orchestrating Omnichannel Engagement MoEngage facilitates consistent and personalized communication across multiple channels, including email, push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, WhatsApp, and website. This ensures a cohesive customer journey and enhances engagement. 3. Offering Advanced Segmentation and Behavioral Analytics The platform’s sophisticated segmentation capabilities allow brands to engage customers based on their behavior, preferences, and real-time actions. AI-powered analytics provide valuable insights into customer journeys, enabling continuous optimization of marketing efforts. 4. Providing Intuitive Campaign Management Tools MoEngage’s drag-and-drop campaign builder empowers marketing teams to create and launch campaigns quickly and independently, reducing reliance on IT. 5. Delivering Personalized Website Experiences Features like behavioral retargeting and dynamic content delivery can significantly enhance website engagement, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversion rates for returning visitors. 6. Improving Mobile Engagement MoEngage enables the delivery of contextual, behavior-triggered push notifications and personalized in-app messaging, boosting app adoption and retention. 7. Ensuring Robust Security and Compliance MoEngage strongly emphasizes data security and complies with industry standards for handling PII, providing the necessary safeguards for customer information. Key Benefits of Embracing a Modern Martech Platform By adopting a comprehensive platform for data unification, management, and customer engagement, India’s leading financial and insurance brands can realize significant benefits: Enhanced Customer Engagement and Retention: Personalized and timely communication across preferred channels leads to higher engagement rates and stronger customer loyalty. Increased Conversion Rates and ROI: Smarter segmentation and targeted messaging drive better lead-to-conversion ratios and improve overall marketing ROI. Faster Campaign Execution and Reduced Time-to-Market: Low-code environments and streamlined workflows enable marketing teams to launch campaigns more quickly and efficiently. Reduced Operational Complexity and IT Dependency: Centralizing communication management under a single platform simplifies workflows and reduces the need for extensive IT involvement. Improved Customer Insights and Data-Driven Decision Making: Robust analytics and reporting capabilities provide real-time data to track campaign performance and optimize marketing strategies continuously. Scalability and Future-Proofing: Modern platforms are designed to scale with the business’s growing needs, offering advanced features as required. A growing need marks the Indian financial services and insurance landscape for customer-centricity. Leading brands can transform their marketing strategies by addressing the challenges of fragmented systems, manual processes, and limited personalization capabilities with a unified customer engagement platform. Embracing automation, personalization, and omnichannel orchestration will streamline operations and enhance efficiency, foster stronger customer relationships, drive business growth, and secure a competitive edge in the digital era. The journey towards a more engaging and data-driven future for these industries is well underway, with modern martech platforms playing a pivotal role in unlocking their full customer engagement potential. Join the transformation today and unlock the full potential of your customer engagement as India’s leading financial and insurance brands with an in-depth product demo of MoEngage! The post Transforming Customer Engagement for India’s Leading Financial and Insurance Brands appeared first on MoEngage.

Reading Time: 10 minutes Finding a push notification software that actually works for B2C marketing isn’t as easy as it sounds. Marketers often grapple with low CTRs, limited targeting options, poor automation, and tools that simply don’t fit well into existing workflows and systems. So, to help you cut through the noise, we’ve curated a list of some of the best push notification platforms currently available in the market, along with the features that make them stand out. Read on to understand how these tools can help you drive better engagement and more conversions with less stress!   What is a Push Notification Software Service? A push notification service is a software tool that allows you to send real-time notifications to devices used by your customers. Push notifications appear as pop-ups or banners on smartphones, desktops, or web browsers. They usually contain information about offers, discounts, product launches, and more. Marketers can create custom messages within push notification software services and add text, images, CTAs, and targeting parameters of their choice. Usually, when a customer lands on a website or downloads an app, they’re asked to allow or block push notifications. If the customer decides to receive web or mobile push notifications, they will receive messages in the notification box or on their screen, prompting immediate action. These notifications will be delivered via services like Firebase Cloud Messaging for Android or Apple Push Notification Service for iOS devices. Push notifications are a great way to re-engage inactive customers, drive immediate action such as sales or sign-ups, send targeted messages based on customer behavior, and reduce cart abandonment.   Top 5 Benefits of Using Push Notification Software Using push notification software helps marketers connect with customers instantly — even with emojis in notifications! Unlike traditional marketing channels like email, push notifications ensure that customers see the message right away instead of requiring them to actively check their inboxes. Whether you’re looking to boost sales, improve customer retention, or drive app engagement, push notification software can be a game-changer. Here’s how: 1. Instant customer engagement Customers see mobile and web push notifications the moment they pop up on their screens. This makes them highly effective for time-sensitive campaigns like flash sales, news updates, or event reminders. Customers are more likely to take immediate action with real-time alerts than respond to an email buried deep in their inbox. 2. Increased conversion rates You can customize rich push notifications and add elements like videos, images, and CTAs to create a sense of urgency and inspire immediate action. It essentially removes friction from the decision-making process and can convert passive customers into active participants. 3. Personalized targeting Advanced push notification tools allow you to segment customers by their browser behavior, location, preferences, and previous interactions. You can then use this information to tailor the message so it feels relevant to the customer. This way, instead of generic messages, customers receive location-based push notifications, or alerts about an item they left in the cart or updates about their favorite products. It makes them more likely to engage with the brand. It’s one of the most effective push notification best practices marketers follow. 4. Reduced cart abandonment If you find that your customers are constantly adding items to their carts but never checking out, automated push notifications through push notification software can be a great way to remind them to complete their purchases. You can add special discounts or offers for products in their cart or use urgency-driven messaging like ‘Only two left in stock!’ or ‘Your coupon code expires in 24 hours!’. These cart recovery messages may be an effective way to recover lost sales by nudging customers to take that last step and complete the transaction. 5. In-depth campaign analytics Finally, push notification software helps you improve your campaigns effectively over time. These platforms give you valuable insights into how your campaigns are performing. Specifically, they allow you to analyze different push notification metrics like open rate, conversion rate, and so on. Armed with this information, you can tweak your campaigns as and when needed.   5 Features to Look for in a Push Notification Service When considering a push notification service, look for features that can actually improve customer engagement and streamline your marketing operations. Here are some of the key features to take into account: 1. Personalized notifications Look for a platform that allows you to segment your customers based on past purchases, browsing behavior, transaction history, app activity, and geography. Granular segmentation enables you to create content tailored to each customer segment. Personalized push notifications are key to sending targeted promotions or recommendations. For instance, let’s say a customer spent some time browsing for a particular item on your website. You can send them an urgency-driven message, saying that the items they viewed are selling out fast, and ask them to complete their purchase. Why this is a key criterion: Personalized notifications contain messages that resonate better with your audience and feel less intrusive than generic messages. In fact, push notifications can cause 88% more app engagement. If your push notification service lacks in-depth personalization features, you might face lower engagement, higher opt-outs, and missed conversion opportunities. 2. Behavior-based automation Behavior-based automation allows you to reach your customers with the right messaging at the right moments in their journey. Choose a push notification software that offers capabilities to monitor activities such as cart abandonment or app inactivity. You can set up an automated workflow to trigger a mobile or Chrome push notification in response to specific customer actions and behaviors. For instance, you can set up a campaign that automatically triggers a push notification when a customer is inactive for more than 10 days on your app. The notification can encourage such customers to revisit the app. Why this is a key criterion: Behavior-based automation is crucial for sending out timely, relevant, and conversion-driven messages to customers. If used right, behavior-based automation can help recover lost revenue and keep customers engaged, reducing churn. Besides, it can save you hours of manually tracking your customers’ activities and help you set up efficient and scalable campaigns. 3. AI-powered delivery optimization One of the most critical tasks with push notifications is to ensure that the messages are sent when customers are most likely to engage with them. If you aim to maximize customer engagement, a push notification service enhanced with AI-powered delivery optimization can help you optimize the timing and the content of your notifications. AI algorithms can analyze customer data and determine the right time and message. It can also automatically schedule the message to be delivered right when a customer has completed a desired action. For example, a fitness app using AI-powered delivery optimization can boost engagement by analyzing app usage, workout times, and time zones. The AI learns that some customers respond best to workout alerts at 7 AM, while others ignore reminders, but engage with new challenges. It then personalizes notifications accordingly — early risers get “Kickstart your day with a quick 15-minute HIIT session!” at 7 AM, while challenge seekers see “New 7-day workout challenge unlocked! Are you in?”. This tailored approach enhances engagement, reduces notification fatigue, and improves customer experience. Why this is a key criterion: AI-powered delivery optimization ensures customers receive personalized content at the right time. The AI tailors both timing and content, depending on customer behavior. It can also analyze A/B test results and refine its messaging strategy, improving engagement and conversions — all without any manual intervention. 4. Push notification templates You can use push notification templates to create notifications without much effort. Rich notification templates take this one step further by allowing you to add images, carousels, and other interactive features to your notifications for better engagement. Using rich notifications is a great way to highlight your products and make them more visually appealing to customers. You can use rich text and bright colors, design non-intrusive notifications, and even add carousels to make your messages attractive and engaging. Why this is a key criterion: Your customers receive dozens of push notifications every day. So, you need to make your messages stand out. Visually rich notifications ensure that your messages capture customers’ attention. Plus, pre-designed templates make it much easier to create campaigns that are optimized for the kind of content you want to send out. 5. No-code campaign creation Another key feature to look for in your push notification tool is a user-friendly interface that allows you to create and deploy push notification campaigns at scale without extensive coding. Look for drag-and-drop editors that enable you to create campaigns quickly, test different approaches, and iterate as needed. Why this is a key criterion: Most marketers are less than familiar with code and may often need to rely on developers to launch campaigns. Tools with drag-and-drop interfaces allow these marketers to create campaigns independently, which, in turn, accelerates the marketing process. It also enables them to swiftly launch campaigns at scale and A/B test campaigns to find which approach works best for them.   5 Best Push Notification Services and Software for Engaging Customers The right push notification software can make a huge difference in terms of boosting engagement and driving conversions. Below, we’ve listed some of the best push notification services available in the market and their standout features: 1. Best for AI-driven personalization and omnichannel engagement: MoEngage Clearly, we’ve got some bias here. But we want to lay it on the line anyway. MoEngage is an AI-powered customer engagement platform designed to help brands create seamless, personalized experiences across multiple channels. The platform enables marketers to send hyper-personalized messages to their customers to increase retention and conversions. Not to mention MoEngage’s powerful AI engine, Sherpa AI, can analyze customer behavior to recommend the optimal message, timing, and channel to ensure maximum engagement. Price: MoEngage offers multiple plans, and the pricing can be customized to your unique needs. Standout features: Customer insights to gain a 360-degree view of your customers Cross-channel marketing Web and app personalization Real-time transactional alerts Journey orchestration Best for: Enterprises and high-growth brands. MoEngage is particularly useful for industries like Ecommerce, fintech, media, and SaaS. No wonder they’ve got over 1,350 customers worldwide, including Poshmark, SoundCloud, and 1Weather. Case in point, 1Weather achieved a 10% higher CTR on their push notifications after switching to MoEngage. Bonus: Got an Ecommerce app? Why don’t you try these 13 push notification templates? 2. Best for basic push notifications: OneSignal OneSignal is a customer engagement platform that offers robust features like real-time messaging, automation, A/B testing, and advanced segmentation. It allows marketers to deliver targeted push notifications across mobile apps and websites. However, its options to customize push notifications as per your needs and preferences are limited. Price: OneSignal offers a free plan with basic features. The platform also has a paid plan that starts at $9 per month with custom pricing for its professional and enterprise plans. Standout features: Cross-channel messaging Visual workflow tool to design customer journeys Advanced segmentation features with audience cohorts and detailed filters Event tracking and in-depth engagement data Best for: SaaS platforms, mobile apps, and Ecommerce brands looking for real-time engagement and automation. 3. Best for Ecommerce: PushOwl PushOwl (acquired by Brevo) is a super user-friendly tool packed with features like automation pre-sets, an SMS marketing suite, and more. It is designed to support diverse marketing strategies through email, push notifications, and SMS. The tool features an easy-to-use interface, powerful segmentation, and a drag-and-drop editor to help create push campaigns. Price: PushOwl offers a free plan and paid plans starting at $19 per month. Standout features: Web push notifications AI-powered campaign editor Behavior-based segmentation AI email generator Best for: Shopify store owners, WooCommerce businesses, and online retailers who want to increase conversions. 4. Best for regulated industries: Pushwoosh Pushwoosh is designed for businesses that need secure, scalable push notification software. It lets you connect with customers across various channels, including email, push notifications, SMS, in-app messaging, and WhatsApp. With robust data safety features, it’s ideal for industries with stringent privacy requirements, like the healthcare industry. Price: Pushwoosh’s free plan includes a limited number of features. Pricing for paid plans depends on the number of subscribers you want to reach out to. Standout features: Customer journey orchestration Push and web notifications Data safety Marketing segmentation tools Actionable customer data platform for mobile apps Best for: Large enterprises, gaming, Ecommerce, subscription-based businesses, and fintech. 5. Best for mobile apps: Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) Previously known as Google Cloud Messaging, FCM is a push notification API for iOS, Android, and web applications. The FCM API allows you to send notifications, data messages, or both with a single API call. It supports targeting individual devices and customer segments. You can also broadcast to all devices subscribed to a particular topic. This makes it helpful in sending news alerts, content updates, or promotional offers to a large audience. Pricing: The FCM API is free, although you may need to pay extra for storage, monitoring, and authentication. Standout features: Customizable for different customer segments Robust and scalable Real-time analytics Comprehensive guides, SDKs, and sample projects Best for: Mobile applications that need to engage customers through personalized, timely notifications while leveraging the broader Firebase ecosystem.   Elevate Customer Messaging with the Right Push Notification Platform Choosing the right push notification software is instrumental in designing powerful campaigns that go beyond just basic messaging and drive meaningful engagement. Features like advanced automation, AI-driven personalization, and seamless omnichannel messaging can help you deliver tailored content to the right audience at the right time. If you’re looking for a comprehensive platform that encompasses all of this and more, MoEngage’s personalized mobile push notification platform is an excellent choice. With its intelligent segmentation, behavior-based automation, and real-time analytics, MoEngage helps brands create push notifications based on highly personalized customer journeys that drive engagement and growth. Ready to elevate your push notification strategy? Explore MoEngage today with an in-depth product demo and unlock the full potential of customer engagement! The post The Best Push Notification Software Platforms for B2C Marketing appeared first on MoEngage.