Company Close Up: It’s More Than Just ‘Web’Engage
“Two pivots, five near death situations and three buyout offers later — here we are — a 200 people strong team spread across three countries and five offices, and $15m in annual recurring revenue,” said Avlesh Singh, the co-founder of WebEngage. A customer data platform, personalisation engine, omnichannel campaign manager, and an analytics engine all […]
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“Two pivots, five near death situations and three buyout offers later — here we are — a 200 people strong team spread across three countries and five offices, and $15m in annual recurring revenue,” said Avlesh Singh, the co-founder of WebEngage.
A customer data platform, personalisation engine, omnichannel campaign manager, and an analytics engine all amalgamated into a seamless full-stack retention. This is WebEngage today, and it’s on a raging mission to expand its services.
Functioning across Asia, the company recently expanded operations to the Middle East. The MEA region is a strategic focus for the company as it marks a key milestone of its journey.
For the last three years, the company has been building relationships in the Middle East, and its regional portfolio includes eXtra, Vezeeta, Btech, elmenus, Ajmal Perfumes, Jazeera Paints, Wego, and MakeMyTrip.
For instance, retail brand eXtra in Saudi Arabia witnessed a 33 per cent increase in purchases through the cart abandonment campaign and a 21 per cent increase in revenue. Meanwhile, Egypt’s food discovery platform Elmenus saw a 25 per cent increase in application orders along with a 32 per cent decrease in communication cost through multi-channel engagement.
Today, WebEngage is actively investing in community building, education, and training initiatives to help nurture the capabilities of customer teams in the region.
Led by Aswin Ravi, Director of MEA, a local sales and customer success team was set up in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and Qatar. Known for his knack to identify new revenue streams and value creation, Ravi is optimistic about the expansion and growth worldwide.
From a pop up engagement tool available in India to a global, fully-stacked retention model, how did it get here?
The Company Journey
Co-founders Singh and Ankit Utreja began to understand the challenges marketers faced to push promotional messages on their websites and measure their impact. And then, “they had a dream”. The first version of WebEngage, a web engagement tool, was launched in October, 2011.
“When I and Ankit started sowing the seeds of WebEngage, we dreamt once more — this one was BIG. We wanted to build a global brand. More importantly, we wanted to create a space — a market that didn’t exist. We wanted to democratise how on-site marketing is done,” said Singh. And so it began. It took three days for their first cheque to be cleared, but since then, revenue has poured.
In 2013, they hit their first milestone with 10,000 websites using the platform actively. But after years of understanding user experiences and demands, the platform decided to pivot.
No longer just an on-site engagement tool, WebEngage turned to a full stack marketing automation model in 2015.
The automation suite, comprising over six channels, powered user engagement across web and mobile. During this time, the Journey Designer, a drag-n-drop workflow builder, became a customer favourite. (more on this feature later)
Fast forward to 2019, the WebEngage portfolio offered over ten engagement channels including Facebook and Google Ads. And in March 2021, their second pivot to retention brought the launch of WebEngage, the Retention operating System (rOS).
Listening to customer feedback got WebEngage to another crossroads, where they chose to become a full-stack rOS. It offered a robust CDP, a personalisation engine, an omnichannel campaign manager, and an analytics engine.
The platform’s rOS is a solution suite for marketers to store and gain actionable insights, and use those action points to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns and hyper personalised CX. The suite is stationed at the cloud handling billions of data points every day, and passing over millions of engagements.
Avlesh Singh, the co-founder of WebEngage
Cut to 2021: Latest Product Launches
In March 2021, WebEngage introduced a web personalisation product to change the A/B testing tools for web and application personalisation. The product helps brands run one-on-one personalised campaigns based on behavioural and demographic data. It also consists of a customer code layout that brings flexibility to the table.
Instead of depending on pre-defined layouts, HTML and CSS codes can be used to alter campaign appearances. It also includes support for a mobile specific image in banner layout, web personalisation callbacks, and support for using screen variables for better targeting.
In June 2021, the company launched a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) feature into their product stack. It boosts the data protection security and access control management. Customers had flexibility to manage information and grant permissions to users at an individual level.
In February 2021, WebEngage introduced RFM Analysis to strengthen its analytics stack. With an in-house algorithm, the feature could narrow down the target audience based on requirements, and it could predict the likeliness of continued user association.
The Journey Designer
In 2016, the company launched a new marketing automation software product, which was in direct competition with Adobe and Salesforce. Piloted by Flipkart, the company decided to coax mid-sized enterprises away from the larger marketing solutions brands.
After raising funds from Blume Ventures, GTI Capital, and Google India, the product was designed to allow companies to automate mail delivery and in-app push notification.
The Growth Accelerator
As a pandemic catalyst, WebEngage for Startups was launched in 2020 to help companies achieve their operational and strategic goals at a much higher speed. Apart from free access to the platform for six months, the participating startups could get product training, in-depth reporting access, and track their business growth.
The Winding Road Ahead
“If not for the obsession of building a brand, we wouldn’t have come this far,” said Singh.
Responsible for over 30 per cent of its customer’s total revenue, today, WebEngage is hard at work to improve its revenue generation tool for businesses and provide a bundled ecosystem for user retention. With its mission target locked, the company hopes to become a one-stop solution for a company’s retention stack for both mid-size and enterprise consumer companies.
It also wants to enable more relevant and personalised communications by using AI and ML solutions. The team is working on making their products more intuitive so that marketers can focus on strategies rather than the tools.
The recently appointed VP, Growth and Marketing Ankur Gattani said, “Our company’s vision is to drive and create strategic business value for WebEngage and its customers, and enable them to have a successful journey with their users.”
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