Retention marketing focusses on engaging and retaining existing customers to drive repeat business and increase customer lifetime value. For companies like WebEngage, a customer data and marketing automation platform, the need for retention marketing is driven by the evolving dynamics of customer relationships and the growing importance of personalised engagement and brand agility.

Balancing the need for personalised customer insights with the growing demand for data privacy and user consent is essential in today’s digital landscape. This involves being transparent about data collection practices, obtaining explicit user consent, and ensuring data security.

Ankur Gattani, chief growth officer, WebEngage, says that the company makes sure that its consumers (brands) make more outcomes from their consumers. He says that for WebEngage, user permission is at the centre and starting point of everything it collects. The company only works with zero and first-party data and has no interplay with a third-party data system which can sometimes have accuracy issues.

“Everything we have in our systems that is captured for a brand has been collected with permission from users. There is a lot of merit to the user experience becoming superior if it is more personalised. If you open the Amazon app, you will not hate it for reminding you where your last trolley was or for offering some recommendations. That is where we are very respectful of people’s preferences,” he shares.

While the industry is gradually moving towards adopting zero or first-party data, it is also believed that using them also comes with challenges. Gattani thinks that the way brands capture this data, store it, and process it is unstructured, hence cleaning up still needs to be done.

“From using this data to making it ready to consume and deploy still requires a significant amount of hard work. Not everyone is putting in that effort, which is why, despite having a lot of data, many brands do not yet provide precise experiences,” he adds.

Clients

WebEngage has about 800 odd clients between India and the Middle East. A fair bit of clients come from e-commerce, retail, D2C, and travel platforms (around 50% of this) and then there’s a dominant chunk from the fintech and BFSI sectors. As per Gattani, fast-moving consumer durables (FMCD) is a new category for the company, and it is seeing significant activity in this area.

He shares that newer, digital-native companies have a relatively faster adoption curve for martech solutions. In some organisations, product teams take the lead because they inherently understand data models, automation, and how to effectively navigate the market.

“There is a lot of mindset shift. A lot of evolution needs to happen in that world before they can squeeze the most value order for a new-age platform like ours,” says Gattani.

The company offers its own tech stack to its clients and Gattani explains that there are three major components of it:

1. A customer data platform that unifies transaction data. For example, if you buy a ticket from a travel platform, the information about the source, destination, date, number of passengers, and travel class is considered customer transaction data.

2. The engagement channels, such as email, WhatsApp, and SMS, through which a brand communicates with its users, constitute the second part of the stack.

3. The third part is the personalisation of the stack. A platform recognises that you are a frequent customer and will notify you with a “Welcome back” message and special offers. This makes the experience completely personalised.

He says that WebEngage handles all these aspects and all of this is now getting supplemented by an AI touch point across the board. “In several parts of the puzzle, you have room for AI to play a role in data unification, segmentation, personalisation, and content generation. Therefore, AI is like a layer across multiple orientations.”

MarTech trends

Gattani notes that businesses are increasingly demanding better outcomes from their martech platforms. He explains that leveraging these platforms requires sophisticated team members who have been extensively trained. He identifies a shift towards more agile platforms that offer faster time-to-value and more effective total cost of operation.

He mentioned that while product-first companies in India are advancing in retention practices, the broader ecosystem is still catching up.

“Retention specifically of growth, as a subject, is still very reasonably advancing. There is a growing interest among students in learning about these topics. This enthusiasm will drive better retention practices in the future. Adoption will end up being a bigger piece than just taking a platform for the sake of it,” he notes.

Gattani believes that unifying customer data and understanding customer value are crucial. “For us, getting adoption across the board for these kinds of concepts and technologies should ultimately benefit our consumer experience. WebEngage is focussing on demonstrating that these solutions are feasible and impactful.”

Talking about enhancing brand agility that WebEngage is currently focussing on, Gattani highlights the opportunities within large enterprises. He explains that the whole dimension of enterprise is where it has seen a lot of interesting things happening because these are large companies that have the appetite to invest but have not been able to solve some of the problems.

He emphasised the need for brands to understand their consumers, including their context and purchase patterns. “Brands need to know who their consumers are, where their context is, and what their purchase patterns are. We are investing our time and effort to get enterprises to think that this is not rocket science and is solvable and this is where we would like to change how things are being done,” he conveys.