Introduction

Over the last 10-12 years, “entrepreneurship” and “startups” have become the new buzzwords and have undoubtedly driven the growth of the Indian Economy by significantly contributing to the GDP of the nation. Starting off with cheap data plans, digital payment identities under the ‘India-stack’ umbrella, adoption of WhatsApp, Facebook, penetration of e-commerce in Tier 3 and Tier 4 markets, our leap into the digital era has been complete.

Hordes of engineering and business graduates secretly dream of building the new Facebook, the new Amazon, the new Airbnb. Almost every big city now boasts of one or more co-working space where “wannapreneurs” can rent out a cheap meeting room and start working on their dream idea with their dream team.

With the number of operational startups at an all time high, fast-paced technology and relentless competition, it’s no longer about getting something sold or getting a purchase recorded. If technology has enabled people to try out your app, it has also helped them to find an alternative if you fail to provide (also read as your competitor’s app). Understanding consumers’ psychology and providing them the right content at the right time has become the go-to strategy for early and late stage startups alike.

The next big engagement is the smartphone. Smartphones became a part of the average household and have evolved over time into something personalized and defined. A smartphone is an extension of the user’s personality, and therefore mobile marketing is an extension of a brand’s personalized outreach.

52% of all worldwide online traffic in 2018 was generated through mobile devices (up from 50% in 2017). Also, more than 55 billion global users access Facebook only through mobile devices. There is a continuous shift in consumers towards mobile as the preferred device for online transactions.

Mobile marketing automation can assist brands in reaching out to their mobile users. This article talks about two KGP alumni who are revolutionising the way how brands and startups are reaching out to their leads and converting them into valuable customers.

MoEngage:- The Ultimate Marketing Automation platform

“MoEngage is an Intelligent Marketing Cloud, built for the Mobile-first world. With MoEngage, companies can orchestrate campaigns across channels like push, email, in-app messaging, web push and SMS, with auto-optimization towards higher conversions powered by machine learning”, reads the description on the Moengage website.

In simple terms, MoEngage enables mobile app companies to deliver personalised interactions through push notifications, in-app recommendations, email campaigns and other retargeting channels. Thus, helping retain and engage users while reducing churn and improving customer lifetime value. It uses an automated marketing platform to include a “lead” into its marketing funnel and create a personalised experience.

MoEngage recently raised USD 9 Mn in Series B funding led by Matrix Partners India and VenturEast. As per their website, the MoEngage Intelligent Marketing Cloud today analyzes more than 30 billion mobile interactions every month, enabling consumer brands to boost user engagement, retention and conversion rates. The analytics gives marketers unprecedented insights into the customer psyche, while the company’s robust AI technology optimizes engagement by identifying the right user for the intended message. Consequently, the company reaches over 200 million users each day while delivering over 15 billion+ interactions every month.

Mobile marketing automation arms marketers with two strengths: Scale and personalization. Further, advanced mobile automation platforms offer better targeting and optimization options that help brands improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and become more relevant to their customers. The quality of these interactions could be enhanced manifold with efficient help from AI-enabled mobile marketing automation tools.

With an objective to help startups get the best out of marketing automation to achieve early growth, MoEngage was founded by IIT Kharagpur alumni Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar. Both of them are graduates of the department of Computer Science and Engineering. They started their entrepreneurial journey by successfully co-founding Delight Circle, an app for spotting best deals that helped e-commerce companies drive mobile conversions early on.

The founders aim to disrupt an industry virtually untouched by technologies such as AI, and Machine learning. With AI at its core, MoEngage uses Sherpa Interaction Graph, a set of machine-learning algorithms that consistently maps each user’s behavior with the pages, products, and brands they visit or shop from, to deliver the right engagement in real-time.

Sherpa: Right content at the right time

Based on the fundamental tenet of ‘Right Time, Right Customer, Right Channel & Right Messaging’, Sherpa is an intelligent system which constantly gathers real-time insights from user actions on the website/application of a business. The data is processed and used to automatically optimize and predict a) the best time to engage with each individual user, b) when the next conversion is likely to happen and c) what will be the right messaging to nudge a user to conduct it. Marketers don’t need to guess what time to send the message for highest response or what content will deliver the highest engagement. Sherpa makes the decision!

The company has also built an efficient push notification delivery platform called Push Amplification, which ensures a push delivery success rate of up to 80% on mobile devices.

Dynamic Product Messaging: The Personalized Automated Salesman

Dynamic Product Messaging (DPM) is a solution designed to help businesses communicate relevant products from their catalog based on a user’s browsing history through push notifications and emails. The company recently entered the league of Facebook and Google with the launch of Dynamic Product Messaging (DPM), a feature that lets businesses send the most relevant product recommendations to users.

Facebook and Google are bigwigs in the ads space and are quite popular among marketers who want to target users looking for a specific product. With the introduction of Dynamic Product Messaging, MoEngage has managed to achieve for Push Notifications and Emails, what Facebook and Google have done for dynamic ads. Through a combination of catalog inputs and user-tracking, Dynamic Product Messaging can send the most relevant product recommendations to users.

Traction and Growth

MoEngage’s phenomenal growth over the last three years doesn’t come as a surprise. The user analytics and mobile engagement platform has expanded to 35 countries and has signed up with top-tier clients such as Samsung, Airtel and, Flipkart.

The AI-based engagement platform has grown by 200% over the past financial year and is targeting an annual recurring revenue of $25M by 2020. Within four years of inception, the company’s international market has grown over 10X with new offices in key markets such as Jakarta and Berlin, along with the existing offices in San Francisco & Bengaluru. More than 65% of the company’s revenue comes from its key markets that include Europe and Middle-East, North America and South-East Asia.

The company plans to use their $9 million Series B funding to expand their global presence, strengthen their data science capabilities, and transform their product into an Integrated Marketing Technology Stack with Engagement, Analytics, and Personalization offerings. The company will have to invest further on customer success with initiatives towards sharing best practices, owing to the stiff competition it is facing from other players like WebEngage and incumbents like Salesforce.

Written By Shail Daswani