AVLESH SINGH
CEO
WEBENGAGE
Personalization is the New Key to Successful Marketing
Mastering the online game is tricky as it appears overwhelming. As per the ‘Digital 2019’ report, 4.38 billion people or 57% of us regularly use the internet. It’s become the world’s largest playing field and all sorts of organizations want in. But all who enter into this space do not thrive. The majority lack the knowledge and the skills to ensure that digital marketing efforts bear fruit.
The most important step to a successful online business model requires business managers to understand how to efficiently engage with customers. Personalization of your value proposition will resonate more powerfully with customers developing deeper relationships. As more customers find your brand valuable, the new challenge is in effectively retaining them all.
An Effective Solution for Customer Retention
WebEngage, India’s leading marketing automation services provider for B2C businesses, provides a strong platform to create data-backed engagement campaigns across multiple channels to maximize user retention.
Engineers Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja co-founded the company in 2011 to provide marketers a full-stack marketing automation solution that facilitates intelligent customer engagement. The CEO, Avlesh Singh, says, “The major challenge different markets face is that people who run marketing automation stacks are not skilled enough. People want to acquire customers, but their retention strategy takes a backseat, which causes a big hit on the business overall in the long term.”
Avlesh continues, “There is an averse skill gap for user retention because effective retention marketing is nuanced and a bit more complex than running spray-and-pray campaigns.” Before modern marketing automation, the spray-and-pray technique of sending bulk messages to many was practiced. Most brands found this method to be ineffective at increasing conversions, and ended up creating a terrible user experience.
With data becoming crucial to providing a consistent, personalized customer experience, customer retention, brands latched on to retention focused approach. This is where WebEngage comes into the picture. Avlesh points out, “WebEngage helps a business create intelligent communication campaigns that don’t bombard its users with the wrong message at improper times. Instead, it helps brands study user behavior and personal attributes to create a detailed user profile.”
Retention marketing is at the core of WebEngage. The platform helps marketers create hyper-personalized communication designed to add real value to users’ lives.
It’s now serving more than 50,000 small and medium businesses, and 300+ enterprise-grade brands design, materialize and present a truly unique marketing automation experience. It enables marketers to leverage several channels including email, SMS, notifications through the web, mobile and apps, Facebook and WhatsApp as well.
Per day, over 250 million messages are sent and more than 150 million users are engaged through WebEngage. Avlesh adds, “We also offer advanced engagement tools in the form of our ‘Journey Designer’ that lets brands visually create workflows that follow users across every stage of their User/Customer Lifecycle. Imagine a drag-and-drop tool that helps you craft your users’ entire brand journey and create a highly personalized experience at massive scale. The Journey Designer makes it possible to create even the most complex, multi-layered lifecycle
marketing campaigns in minutes.”
WebEngage respects every business it has onboarded so far. The conversions and elevated numbers that these businesses highlight in their success stories are mind blowing. Abhishek Bukkar, customer lifecycle manager of Chaayos, a retail beverage chain, seemed ecstatic to witness 20-22 % uplift in repeat purchases in just 3 months. He attributes WebEngage for enhancing the organization’s marketing competence and Chaayos is now focused on designing its ideal user experience. Similarly, big names such as Yatra and Coverfox have thanked WebEngage for boosting their sales, reducing shopping cart abandonment and increasing their business value in the market. Flipkart, eBay, Goibibo, Wadi, Myntra, and Souq are only a few of the innumerable clients who trust WebEngage.
The company is driven by proactive professionals working together to help businesses grow. “We want our customers to get as much value as they can from our products. Therefore, one of the ways we engage with our customers is to understand the various business problems they face and then see how our software can evolve to solve those problems,” says Arpit Rai, VP Products. What resonates with each employee is the willingness to understand client’s problems the readiness to be fully invested in solving them.
Envisioning a Tech-Savvy India
“Retention is not traditional but data-driven. From my point of view, India is 10 years behind the rest and other Asian countries are 5 years behind India,” notes Avlesh. He believes that only strong education and awareness initiatives will help India towards better technology competence. Initiatives such as conferences, eBooks, blogs, podcasts and experiential marketing can educate people on how to retain customers, improve product experience and build a flow where retention rounds up the maximum business.
‘EngageMint’ is the company’s flagship retention marketing conference. Here, successful business leaders share valuable information to create a solid understanding of achieving effective customer retention and engagement. Through hands-on learning, actionable insights and a clear glimpse into the latest practices, EngageMint is truly valuable and a powerful means to develop skill sets. Avlesh explains, “Our flagship retention marketing conference is one of the main vehicles by which we are trying to educate marketers about modern-day techniques that can create sustainable, unrestricted growth via user retention. In just 2 editions, it is already being regarded as Asia’s largest retention marketing conference.”
Avlesh reveals the company’s future focus, “Ankit and I foresee WebEngage growing in MENA and SEA regions strongly. These are the markets WebEngage is ready to venture into without any apprehensions. Moreover, we look forward to intensifying our product features in the data, AI and ML spheres.”
Facing ambitious goals for the future, WebEngage hasn’t lost sight of optimizing the day-to-day business. Avlesh plans to keep building out the core product to improve the user experience and value for marketers, and introducing simple solutions for a lot of common use-cases. He concludes, “With our next major product launch in the form of Relays, WebEngage is going to add another aspect of product-side communication that strengthens our core product and gives the brand a versatility that is unmatched at this level.”
