New Delhi, Sept. 9 -- Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved beyond being a niche experiment in marketing and has become a key tool for businesses to connect with, understand, and retain customers. WebEngage, a Mumbai-based marketing automation platform, leverages data-driven automation to drive growth, serving over 900 clients in industries like e-commerce, travel, and fintech.
Led by a team of more than 375 professionals, WebEngage draws nearly half its revenue from India and about 30% from the Middle East. In an exclusive interaction with TechCircle, Ankit Utreja, Co-founder & CTO of WebEngage, elaborates on how AI and other data-driven technologies are helping marketers automate campaigns, scale personalisation, and build customer trust-while staying compliant and agile in an evolving regulatory landscape. Edited excerpts.
What is contextual marketing, and how does it improve customer experience and ROI?
Contextual marketing uses real-time signals-like user behaviour, preferences, and location-to deliver personalised and timely content. It's about showing the right message to the right person at the right time. For example, if a user browses running shoes, they'll later see top-rated products and related accessories like fitness trackers on the platform's homepage. This instantly boosts engagement and purchase probability.
By tailoring interactions to specific customer needs, brands reduce friction and create seamless experiences. Customers are more likely to engage with content that feels relevant and intuitive, which in turn improves satisfaction. From a business standpoint, contextual marketing drives ROI through higher conversion rates, customer retention, and efficient spend by targeting high-intent users and reducing the path to purchase.
What engagement improvements have you seen with AI-powered automation?
At WebEngage, we automate marketing efforts via a single dashboard using visual drag-and-drop workflows. Once a campaign is set up, it evolves in real-time with user behaviour-without manual intervention. Brands can consistently deliver personalised, non-repetitive messages across channels, leading to significantly better engagement and retention rates.
Are customer engagement platforms evolving into AI copilots or hyper-automated orchestration tools?
They're evolving into both. As an AI copilot, WebEngage provides marketers with smart recommendations, predictive segmentation, and journey insights-enabling faster, data-backed decisions without compromising creative control. At the same time, we power hyper-automated orchestration by managing multi-channel campaigns, personalising communication at scale, and responding instantly to customer actions-all without manual effort. This dual approach helps marketers stay in control while leveraging automation to deliver efficiency, relevance, and measurable ROI.
How is AI helping you enhance customer engagement?
Engagement is about building an emotional connection with customers-every interaction from first visit to post-purchase support matters. With AI and machine learning, we offer large-scale personalisation, real-time insights, and predictive analytics to meet evolving customer expectations. For instance, AI-driven chatbots address queries empathetically, while predictive models help brands forecast churn and act before customers disengage. Our tools enable personalised product suggestions, tailored campaigns, and 24/7 customer support. By modelling the full customer lifecycle, brands can build trust and loyalty while delivering hyper-personalised experiences.
Which other technologies are you integrating to enhance customer experience, improve ROI, and drive business outcomes?
WebEngage integrates with customer data platforms (CDPs), customer relationship management (CRM), and data lakes to unify customer data from multiple sources and create a single customer profile. This allows for targeted, omnichannel interactions-across email, push, and in-app communication. Our CDP capabilities support real-time data processing and advanced activation strategies, while data lake integrations help with predictive modelling and trend analysis.
This layered approach ensures brands can harness their data effectively, personalise at scale, and create consistent, meaningful customer experiences.
Can you share a client success story?
One of our key partnerships is with Shoppers Stop, a leading retail chain aiming to offer an omnichannel experience. We implemented features like journey designer, push notifications, event and funnel analysis, and a recommendation engine.
As a result, Shoppers Stop saw a 2X jump in CRM revenue contribution, a 57% increase in website CRM sessions, a 50% drop in cost per revenue for campaigns, and a 30% improvement in CRM conversion rates compared to the previous year. These outcomes reflect how automation and data-driven engagement can transform customer retention strategies.
How important is consent management, especially in regulated sectors?
Consent management - the process of obtaining, recording, and managing user consent for the collection and use of their personal data - is vital. While many assume customer data platforms (CDPs) cover consent requirements, the operational aspects-like compliance across jurisdictions, handling Subject Access Requests, and providing dashboards for data protection-require dedicated systems. At WebEngage, we integrate with consent management platforms (CMPs) via open APIs to streamline requests and ensure regulatory compliance without compromising customer trust.
How do you maintain a competitive edge while scaling rapidly?
Our strength lies in blending depth with adaptability. Our architecture enables high-volume personalisation without delays, helping brands move from siloed data to real-time customer engagement quickly. We make sophisticated marketing tools accessible-our predictive segmentation and journey optimisation tools are fast, transparent, and marketer-friendly. Unlike our competitors, we don't just offer automation; we give marketers the ability to experiment, iterate, and grow without technical constraints.
What's WebEngage's long-term vision?
Our goal is to make retention marketing effortless and data-driven. By integrating with systems like CRM, loyalty platforms, and ticketing tools, we aim to address customer engagement holistically. Our future roadmap includes deeper integrations that help businesses personalise every touchpoint while staying compliant and scalable.
What sets WebEngage apart, and where do you see room for improvement?
Our zero-PII composable CDP is a key differentiator-it allows businesses to use their existing data architecture while keeping sensitive information secure. Also, our user journeys framework is more flexible than others in the market, making it ideal for both startups and enterprises. Besides, we're constantly refining integrations, onboarding experiences, and compliance tools to meet diverse customer needs across regions like BFSI, EdTech, and e-commerce.
What's in store for WebEngage going forward?
We're expanding our AI capabilities. After launching Insights CoPilot last quarter, we're rolling out Segmentation and Campaign CoPilot this quarter, with Governance CoPilot coming soon. Beyond generative AI, we're exploring deeper machine learning (ML) models to enable one-to-one personalisation at scale-keeping retention marketing smarter, faster, and more intuitive
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.