The only thing that’s tougher than keeping up with the Kardashians is keeping up with your customers. Their needs, demands, and preferences constantly change. This is where a customer engagement software can help.
With an array of softwares out there, choosing the best customer engagement software for your online marketing campaigns can be overwhelming. Yet, it’s vital for nurturing lasting relationships with your audience.
The right tool can transform your customer interactions, making every touchpoint an opportunity for engagement.
In this blog, we’ve carefully chosen the best softwares to make the decision easier for you. This guide stands as your essential tool, steering you through the premier solutions to elevate customer interactions and boost engagement.
What is customer engagement software?
Customers today demand personalized connections with your brand. Their behaviors are constantly changing, and as a marketer, your brand is expected to provide a consistent experience throughout.
This is where a customer engagement software can shine. It enhances interactions between your brand and your customers, aiming to deepen relationships beyond mere transactions. It’s designed to create a positive, emotional bond, encouraging repeat business and positive referrals.
By understanding and responding to customer needs and feedback, customer engagement software helps create personalized experiences, fosters loyalty and advocacy, and ultimately drives business success.
Why use a customer engagement software?
The customer engagement software market is estimated to reach $36.74 bn by 2029 at a CAGR of 10.97%.
What does this mean? Brands recognize the significance of this software in maintaining competitive advantage and driving business growth.
The software collects comprehensive data about your customers, building profiles that understand them better than they understand themselves. With that, you can create effective customer engagement marketing strategies basis different customer segments, buyer journeys and more.
These strategies can be executed across 9+ channels like email, WhatsApp, SMS and push notifications enables you to offer personalized experiences across the customer journey.
When customers feel connected to a brand, they are more likely to stay loyal, make repeat purchases, and advocate for your brand. This helps in retaining them, increase sales, and create a positive reputation for your brand.
Top 12 customer engagement software to try in 2024
There are plenty of customer engagement software options out there. To simplify your decision, we’ve curated the top 12 for easy comparison.
| Software | Best Feature | G2 Rating |
| Netcore Cloud | AI-led omnichannel communication with in-channel conversions | 4.5 |
| Iterable | Cross-channel communication | 4.5 |
| ActiveCampaign | Advanced automation tools | 4.5 |
| Braze | Simplifies building and automating cross-channel campaigns | 4.5 |
| Airship | Strong focus on mobile experiences | 4.0 |
| Klaviyo | Email design capabilities | 4.6 |
| Hubspot Marketing Hub | Ad retargeting & CRM solution | 4.4 |
| Blueshift | Easy & intuitive interface | 4.4 |
| Customer.io | Flexible data model ensures easy data updates | 4.4 |
| Insider | Cross-channel journey builder | 4.8 |
| OneSignal | “Confirmed Delivery” feature to monitor notification delivery and permission changes accurately. | 4.6 |
| Twilio | Integrate voice, text, and video messaging capabilities into web and mobile applications. | 4.2 |
1. Netcore Cloud
Netcore Cloud is a comprehensive solution designed to enhance the way B2C brands interact with their customers.
Key features like providing a unified customer view, drag-and-drop customer journey builders, getting AI-based insights, predictions and recommendations make Netcore a unique customer engagement platform.
Another key benefit of Netcore is that we own all the communication channels used to send out messages. This means you don’t have to rely on third-party applications or software to integrate with your website or app.
Our GenAI engine is the latest innovation in the Netcore arsenal. You can create, iterate, and execute campaigns, journeys, and dashboards by simply writing relevant prompts. The co-pilot also helps create and provides deep insights on the content generated and how it will perform once implemented.
Book a live demo to explore how Netcore’s customer engagement platform actively boosts your brand’s engagement and drives conversions.
2. Iterable
Iterable is a tool that makes talking to your customers personal and direct across all platforms you’d want to chat, like emails, texts, or pop-ups on your phone. They tell you what each customer likes and doesn’t like, so every message feels like it’s just for them.
Key features such as workflow automation, deep customer segmentation, dynamic content adaptation, and comprehensive analytics make Iterable a powerful tool for optimizing customer engagement strategies.
It specializes in cross-channel campaign orchestration, allowing for complex campaign building across different channels. You can send out all these messages across different channels without breaking a sweat, meeting your customers wherever they hang out online.
3. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers a marketing automation and customer experience (CX) tool under the umbrella of their Customer Experience Automation Platform (CXA). This platform goes beyond traditional marketing automation by focusing on the entire customer journey, from initial acquisition to post-purchase engagement and advocacy.
Imagine a tool that helps you connect with your customers on a deeper level, like remembering their preferences and sending them personalized messages. That’s what ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation and customer experience (CX) tools are all about.
It goes beyond just blasting out emails. You can create automated workflows that send targeted messages based on what your customers do or don’t do.
Think welcome emails for new subscribers, abandoned cart reminders, or even birthday greetings. You can also segment your audience to send even more relevant messages, like special offers to your most loyal customers.
Plus, it integrates with all your favorite marketing tools, so you can keep everything organized and streamlined.
4. Braze
Braze is a leading comprehensive customer engagement software that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love.
With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real-time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns, continuously evolve their customer engagement, and drive customer engagement and marketing strategies together.
Braze helps you create automated campaigns across different channels, like email, push notifications, and even in-app messages. These messages can be personalized based on what your customers do or haven’t done, so they always feel relevant and timely.
5. Airship
Airship is a customer engagement software that stands out for its centralized, multi-channel communication, such as push notifications, emails, SMS, and in-app messages. It focuses on delivering personalized customer experiences to drive engagement, retention, and conversion.
With Airship, companies can automate their communication strategies, segment their audience for targeted messaging, and gain insights into customer behavior to optimize their campaigns further. It’s particularly valued for its ability to orchestrate complex customer journeys and analyze the impact of each interaction.
6. Klaviyo
Klaviyo makes your marketing smarter by using all the customer info you’ve got. It’s designed to help you grow and handles everything from emails to SMS and online ads easily. It specializes in ecommerce marketing automation. Klaviyo goes beyond just blasting out emails. It delves into customer behavior, learning what they browse, purchase, and even abandon in their carts.
Other notable features include product recommendations and post-purchase win-back campaigns. It also integrates well with Shopify.
With Klaviyo, you can pull together all your customer data in one place, making it super simple to send personalized messages across different platforms.
7. Hubspot Marketing Hub
Hubspot’s customer engagement software is a popular choice among marketers looking to scale their marketing campaigns.
It integrates various features like email marketing, social media management, live chat, and customer service tools into one seamless system. The software excels in creating personalized experiences through its CRM capabilities, ensuring that every customer feels valued and understood.
HubSpot allows businesses to track customer interactions, automate marketing campaigns, and analyze performance to continually improve engagement strategies.
8. Blueshift
Blueshift is a powerful customer engagement software that combines data, AI, and automation to help businesses deliver personalized customer experiences across multiple channels.
It stands out for its SmartHub CDP (Customer Data Platform) feature, enabling companies to unify their customer data into a single source of truth. This allows for highly targeted, automated marketing campaigns that feel personal and relevant to each customer.
Blueshift’s strength lies in its ability to use real-time insights to dynamically adapt marketing efforts, ensuring maximum engagement and conversion.
9. Customer.io
Customer.io’s customer engagement platform takes a different approach, focusing on building genuine relationships with your customers through personalized experiences. It analyzes extensive data, including user activity and purchase history, to deliver tailored experiences.
Key offerings include flexible audience segmentation, multi-channel outreach (email, SMS, etc.), automated personalized campaigns, and robust A/B testing for optimization. Businesses see higher engagement, improved conversions, stronger loyalty, and better marketing ROI thanks to its focus on relevance and personalized communication.
10. Insider
Insider’s marketing automation platform is designed to personalize customer journeys by utilizing data from various sources to create a unified customer view. The tool aggregates customer data, uses AI to forecast their actions, and crafts highly personalized experiences.
This approach enables predictive AI to automate experiences across multiple channels for personalized interactions. Key features include personalized messaging, cross-channel journey orchestration, A/B testing, and a comprehensive data management system.
Using this tool boosts engagement, conversions, loyalty, and ROI, offering a robust marketing strategy solution for any business size.
11. Onesignal
OneSignal offers businesses a robust customer engagement tool for delivering clear and effective marketing messages. The versatility of OneSignal in reaching audiences directly plays a pivotal role in keeping them engaged with your brand.
The standout features of OneSignal include its ability to facilitate multi-channel communication, enabling businesses to reach their audience through push notifications, web push notifications, SMS, and email from a single, unified platform.
OneSignal’s segmentation feature enables sending targeted messages to customer groups based on their interests and actions.
12. Twilio
Twilio’s platform uses customer data to enable businesses to tailor their interactions with each individual customer.
Twilio revolutionizes business communications by integrating phone, VoIP, and messaging into web and mobile apps, removing the complexity of telecom hardware. It offers a cloud API for developers to create advanced communication systems, scaling with app usage and charging only for what’s used, with no contracts.
By personalizing interactions, businesses can create more meaningful connections with their customers, leading to a more positive perception of the brand. Twilio’s multi-channel engagement greatly enhances customer retention by keeping them more involved and increasing their likelihood to return.
Twilio offers a free plan and provides custom pricing depending on the requirements for the features to be implemented.
What to consider when choosing the best customer engagement software
Choosing the right customer engagement software requires weighing key factors to match your business objectives and meet customer demands.
1. Integration capabilities:
Ensure the software integrates seamlessly with your existing CRM and any other tools you use to provide a unified view of customer interactions.
2. Scalability:
The software should be able to support your business growth, handling increased volumes of engagements without compromising on performance.
3. Personalization features:
Look for advanced personalization capabilities like product recommendations, segmentation, personalized boutique pages, and more that allow you to tailor communications based on customer data, preferences, and behavior.
4. Analytics and reporting:
Comprehensive analytics tools are crucial for measuring engagement effectiveness, customer behavior, churn predictions, and customer satisfaction and identifying areas for improvement to engage and retain existing customers.
5. Communication channels supported:
The platform should offer a wide range of channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, social media, live chat, and other communication channels to meet customers where they are and maximize interactions.
6. User interface (UI) and user experience (UX):
A user-friendly interface for your team can significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of your engagement strategies. Navigating the software, creating marketing campaigns, and analyzing dashboards should be easy and intuitive for marketers to use and deploy.
7. Proactive Customer Support:
High-quality, responsive customer support from the software provider ensures any issues you encounter can be resolved quickly. Customer service should assist brands throughout, from onboarding to campaign launch and issue resolution, ensuring marketing success and goal achievement.
8. Compliance with Data Protection Regulations:
The software must comply with GDPR, CCPA, or any relevant data protection laws to protect customer information and privacy. This helps brands maintain trust with their customers, prevent legal issues, and promote a privacy-focused app
Conclusion
Customer engagement in your marketing campaign is no longer a luxury but a necessity today for building deep connections with customers.
With the right customer engagement software and a personalized and customer-first mindset, your brand can earn a spot in the minds of your customers amongst thousands of other brands.
Remember, the best choice will depend on your specific goals, the size of your business, and the type of engagement you seek with your customers.
