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A Guide to Customer-Centric Tools & Technologies

The Customer Engagement Stack

Welcome to the second annual edition of 'The Customer Engagement Stack', our yearly exploration of the leading tools and tactics businesses around the world are using to elevate customer interactions.

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Illustration: Customer Engagement Stack

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Introduction

As we step into 2024, it's evident that customer experiences have become the ultimate differentiator in a fiercely competitive market. At the same time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have emerged as pivotal forces, revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers.

This paradigm shift has led to the evolution of the traditional tech stack into something more dynamic and customer-centric: what we like to call the Customer Engagement Stack.

Central to this new stack is the Customer Data Platform (CDP), a tool that unifies data to fuel unparalleled customer experiences. However, the journey towards efficient and fully integrated customer data infrastructure is fraught with challenges. Recent research shows that almost one-third (30%) of business leaders are overwhelmed by the amount of data across their organizations, which is expected to more than double in size by 2026.

In our comprehensive 2024 CDP Report, we explored over 12 Trillion API Calls to provide an updated perspective on the technology ecosystems that shape customer interactions. Based on our findings, we've identified the top categories and the most impactful applications that are now critical components of the modern Customer Engagement Stack.

As you navigate this guide, you’ll learn how the right tools and tactics, with a CDP as your cornerstone, can revolutionize your organization. Embracing this data-driven approach will pave the way for better customer connections, accelerate business growth, and solidify your position as a market leader.

 

Illustration: Introduction

Before we get into the leading tools across the customer engagement stack, let’s first plot the trajectory of the different categories of tools on the Twilio Segment platform over the past five years.

 

 

This graph not only illustrates a growth pattern – it narrates the evolving priorities of businesses in an increasingly data-centric world.

Data warehouses, represented by the bold red line, have undergone an extraordinary surge, particularly notable from 2020 onwards. This trend can be attributed to several factors:

  • Increasing challenges faced by data architects and platform leads, such as fragmented customer data and the need for efficient real-time data processing
  • The market demand for platforms that offer integration flexibility with existing systems and scalability to meet evolving business needs
  • Businesses outgrowing the limitations of traditional CRMs in favor of versatile, computation-ready data warehouses, spurred by the need for a single source of truth

 

 

Categories

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a critical component of an effective customer engagement strategy. By testing different variations of web pages, emails, or ads, businesses can determine which elements are most effective in driving customer behavior. Below we’ll explore some of the top A/B testing tools on the Twilio Segment platform to understand the unique features that can help businesses take their customer engagement to the next level.

Recipe

A/B test your tech stack

In this recipe, you'll learn how to design, run, and analyze an A/B test to determine what marketing tools are generating the most ROI.

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Leading digital experience platform, Optimizely, was the top A/B testing tool on the Twilio Segment platform for 2022. The platform allows teams to create and optimize digital experiences through data-driven experimentation. It offers a user-friendly interface for A/B and multivariate testing across web and mobile, and shows experiment performance and statistical significance to make decision-making easy. Optimizely also has powerful personalization capabilities, allowing teams to create hyper-targeted experiences for different segments of their audience.

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Apptimize is an A/B testing and release management platform that helps mobile teams drive engagement and revenue through experimentation. It allows users to experiment with different app experiences, messaging, and features without the need for code releases, and it supports a variety of test types including A/B testing, multivariate testing, and feature rollouts. Apptimize also has a powerful visual editor that allows users to design and modify app experiences without any coding skills.

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AB Tasty is an intuitive experimentation and personalization solution. It allows you to modify sites using a visual editor, without writing any code, and without technical knowledge. You can then measure which versions of your pages produce the best results for your objectives (pageviews, registrations, purchases, etc.). To run a test simply install our tag on the different pages of your site. Once the tag has been added, you don’t have to worry about it anymore, because the same tag allows you to run all your future tests.

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Visual Web Optimizer (VWO) is an all-in-one optimization platform that allows teams to optimize their web experiences through experimentation and personalization. It offers a user-friendly interface for A/B testing and multivariate testing, as well as powerful personalization capabilities. VWO also has a range of other optimization features, such as heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys, to help teams better understand their users and optimize their experiences accordingly.

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Advertising

With so many different advertising platforms available, it can be challenging to choose the right ones for your business. In this section, we'll introduce you to some of the most popular advertising tools used by Twilio Segment customers today. These tools allow you to target specific audiences and deliver personalized messaging, making it easier to engage and convert potential customers.

Recipe

How to Use Lookalike Audiences and Audience Suppression

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to use Twilio Engage (formerly Segment Personas) to create hyper-specific audiences in advertising platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest to increase advertising efficiency.

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The Meta Pixel is a piece of code on your website that can help you better understand the effectiveness of your advertising and the actions people take on your site. You’ll also be able to see when customers took an action after seeing your ad on Facebook and Instagram, which can help you with retargeting. As the leading advertising tool on the Twilio Segment platform, some of its top features include conversion, tracking, and remarketing, so marketers can manage ads from one platform.

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More than 80% of businesses worldwide use Google Ads for advertising and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on Google's search engine results pages, YouTube, and other websites within the Google Display Network. Be seen where your customers are searching, browsing and watching across the web with these features:

  • Search trend research and creation of targeted cross-platform Google ads with keyword planner
  • Custom Google ads based on country, city, region, or distance from location
  • “Customer Match” to market campaigns to target audiences using customer data like email addresses
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Business and social networking platform, LinkedIn, turns 20 years old in 2023. With 875 million members, the platform offers businesses a variety of advertising options, including sponsored content, sponsored InMail, and display ads. Unique features of LinkedIn ads include the ability to target specific job titles, industries, and company sizes, as well as retarget users who have engaged with a business's content or website.

 

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With over 100 million daily active users and as the default search option for Chat-GPT, Microsoft’s Bing had a big 2023. Bing Ads is Microsoft's advertising platform that allows businesses to place ads on Bing search results pages, as well as other Microsoft-owned properties like MSN and Outlook.com. The ability to import campaigns from Google Ads, target specific demographics or locations, and track conversions using a Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag are just a few of the features Bing Ads has to offer

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Analytics

By analyzing customer data, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs, which allows them to create more personalized, targeted experiences. In this section, we'll explore some of the top analytics tools being used on the Twilio Segment platform and highlight their unique features and use cases.

Recipe

Identify high-value users with historical count analysis

In this recipe, examine the exact moment in the customer journey that converts new users into high-value customers. Then, create monitoring that surfaces high-value users to build look-a-like audiences.

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Mixpanel is a comprehensive product analytics platform that provides real-time data and insights to help businesses understand how users engage with their products. Its powerful tools enable companies to track user behavior across devices and channels, analyze user interactions, and segment customers based on their actions, enabling them to optimize their product and marketing strategies.

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Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google’s new analytics property, for both websites and applications. GA4 has machine learning at its core to help give you a more complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. Emerging in response to changing online privacy norms and consumer patterns, GA4 offers in-depth insights into user interactions, tracking engagement, revenue generation, and retention.

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Amplitude is a comprehensive product intelligence platform that seamlessly collects and interprets user behavior across digital platforms like websites and mobile apps. Its robust capabilities allow businesses to analyze user engagement, discover patterns, and categorize users based on their behavior. This empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions and execute optimization strategies that enhance user experience and drive business growth.

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Heap is an easy-to-use product analytics platform that automatically captures and tracks user behavior across websites and mobile apps. Its powerful tools enable businesses to analyze user interactions, identify trends, and segment customers based on their actions, enabling them to optimize their product and marketing strategies.

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Fullstory is on a mission to help technology leaders make better, more informed decisions by injecting behavioral data into their analytics stack. Fullstory unlocks the power of quality behavioral data at scale so enterprises can get closer to their customers’ true sentiment and intentions–predicting what they want, creating personalized experiences, increasing conversion, improving loyalty–and driving revenue.

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CRM

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a critical category of technology for businesses in their customer engagement efforts. By leveraging CRM tools, businesses can manage their interactions with customers, track their behavior and preferences, and build stronger relationships. In this section, we'll round up some of the top CRM tools on the Twilio Segment platform and highlight their key features, which allow businesses to create more personalized customer experiences.

Recipe

Set up lead scoring to improve sales efficiency and accelerate pipeline

In this recipe, you'll learn how to set up lead scoring, send those lead scores to your CRM, and keep your sales team focused on the most important accounts.

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Intercom is a customer service platform that helps businesses connect with their customers through personalized, targeted messaging. It enables businesses to send messages through multiple channels like email, in-app messages, and push notifications. Real-time and automated messaging allows businesses to engage with customers when they are most active and save time by sending personalized messages to customers at the right time.

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Freshsales is a CRM platform that helps businesses manage their sales pipeline and customer relationships. It has a range of features like lead management, deal management, and email tracking that enable businesses to track customer interactions and sales activities. Freshsales also offers its AI-based lead scoring system to help businesses prioritize their leads based on their likelihood to convert.

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HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service software that helps businesses manage their customer relationships from end-to-end. Its leading offering is its free CRM that allows businesses to manage their customer data and interactions in one place. HubSpot also offers a range of automation features that help businesses save time by automating repetitive tasks, and it integrates with a range of other tools to create a seamless customer experience.

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As a long time leader in the space, Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps businesses manage their customer relationships, sales, and marketing activities. It boasts features like customizable dashboards allow businesses to monitor and track their sales performance in real-time. Salesforce also offers a range of automation features that help businesses save time by automating repetitive tasks, while integrating with a range of other tools to create a seamless customer experience.

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Customer Success

Customer success involves managing the customer journey from initial purchase to continued use of a product or service, with the goal of ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. By leveraging customer success tools, businesses can proactively monitor customer behavior and preferences, provide targeted guidance, and offer personalized support. To give you the complete overview, we'll take stock of the leading customer success tools being used on the Twilio Segment platform.

Recipe

Break down data silos between your sales and support teams

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to keep sales and support aligned by enriching your user profiles with information from Salesforce and syncing that data to Zendesk.

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Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform that offers a suite of tools to help businesses manage customer relationships. The platform offers a multi-channel support system that allows for customer interactions across a variety of channels such as email, chat, phone, and social media. Zendesk also features advanced analytics and reporting tools to help businesses monitor performance and identify areas for improvement.

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Satismeter is a customer feedback management platform that helps businesses measure customer satisfaction and improve customer experience with in-app and email surveys that can be customized to meet specific business needs, automatic trigger-based surveys, and real-time feedback analysis.

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Totango is a customer success management platform that helps businesses improve customer retention and loyalty. The platform includes real-time customer insights, automated customer engagement campaigns, and customer health scores based on a variety of factors such as usage patterns and engagement history.

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Help Scout is a customer support platform that enables businesses to manage customer interactions across multiple channels. A shared inbox, knowledge base management system, and automated workflows help streamline customer service processes on the platform. Help Scout also offers advanced reporting and analytics tools to help businesses monitor performance and identify areas for improvement.

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Email

In this section, we’ll highlight some of the most powerful email tools available to modern businesses, and how they can help to create meaningful customer experiences. From automated campaigns to A/B testing and dynamic content, these tools provide a range of features to help businesses of all sizes connect with customers more effectively

Recipe

Increase conversion with personalized lifecycle campaigns

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to create behavior-based email campaigns personalized to different personas of your product.

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Customer.io is an email marketing automation tool that enables you to send behavior-triggered emails, push notifications, and SMS messages to your customers. Its unique features include a drag-and-drop campaign builder, customer profiles that allow you to store customer data, and real-time analytics that provide insight into your campaigns' performance.

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MailChimp is a popular email marketing tool that allows you to send marketing emails, automated messages, and targeted campaigns to your audience. It offers a variety of email templates, including a drag-and-drop builder, and allows you to segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, and more. MailChimp's key features include A/B testing, which enables you to test different email elements to optimize your campaigns, and e-commerce integration that allows you to track purchases and revenue from your campaigns

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Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables you to send personalized messages across channels, including email, push notifications, and in-app messages. It offers a variety of targeting options, including segmentation, behavior-based triggers, and real-time user data. The platform also includes an AI-powered recommendation engine, which allows you to suggest products or content based on user behavior, and advanced reporting that provides insights into engagement and conversion rates.

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Iterable is a cross-channel marketing automation tool that allows you to send personalized messages across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, and direct mail. It offers a drag-and-drop campaign builder, advanced segmentation, and real-time analytics. Iterable's unique features include workflow automation, which allows you to create complex campaigns with branching logic, and predictive analytics that help you identify the best time to send messages to your audience.

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Founded in 2009 as a pioneer in push notifications, Airship’s platform gives brands the user-level data, engagement channels, AI orchestration and services they need to deliver push notifications, emails, SMS, in-app messages, mobile wallet cards and more to exactly the right person in exactly the right moment — building trust, boosting engagement, driving action, and growing value.

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Personalization

Personalization tools are designed to tailor customer engagement by leveraging data to provide a customized experience. These tools analyze customer interactions, preferences, and behaviors to deliver relevant content, recommendations, and offers in real-time.. This section will delve into some of the leading personalization tools available on the Twilio Segment platform, highlighting their key features and how they contribute to creating a more personalized and engaging customer journey.

Movable Ink is a powerful platform that empowers marketers to transform data into unique personalized content for each customer at the moment of engagement. By combining customer data and AI, marketers can leverage Movable Ink to ensure that customers see the most relevant message in email or mobile to improve conversion, loyalty, and engagement.

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Talon.One is a promotion and loyalty solution that helps brands streamline the process to run and scale their incentive campaigns. The Talon.One platform allows companies to easily build rich promotional campaigns at scale, across both in-store and online channels. Brands can then track the effectiveness of those promotions or loyalty programs and offer personalized offers, target specific products, and increase sales by applying promotions at the shopping-cart level.

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Elastic Path is a leading composable commerce platform that allows marketers and merchants to launch dynamic storefronts and shoppable content that adapts in real-time using conditional rules about when and what to offer shoppers. In just a few clicks, digital teams can personalize shopping experiences for their top customers with loyalty experiences, offer discounts or exclusive savings, target past customers with win-back offers, and target abandoned carts with hyper-relevant promotions.

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Contentful is an intelligent composable content platform that enables both technical and non-technical users to easily create, manage, publish, and expand distinct content experiences. The Contentful Platform, Contentful Studio, and the Contentful Ecosystem combine the flexibility of composable content with the intelligence of AI, empowering digital teams to drive business momentum through collaboration, speed, and scale.

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Screen Recording and Heatmaps

Screen recording & heatmap tools allow businesses to gain an in-depth understanding of their customers' behaviors and preferences by recording user sessions on websites and mobile apps. With this data, companies can identify pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience. In this section, we'll take a closer look at some of the top screen recording & heatmap tools on the Twilio Segment platform and explore their leading features.

Hotjar provides a suite of tools designed to analyze and optimize user behavior, allowing businesses to tailor their customer engagement strategies for maximum impact. With Hotjar, businesses can generate heatmaps that reveal which areas of their website or application are most popular or problematic for users. Additionally, Hotjar's feedback tool enables businesses to gather valuable customer insights and use that data to drive engagement. By identifying key areas for improvement, businesses can optimize the user experience, increase engagement, and retain customers.

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Crazy Egg is a powerful heatmap tool that empowers businesses to analyze and optimize their customers' experiences. With Crazy Egg, businesses can generate heatmaps of user activity, enabling them to identify popular or problematic areas of their website or application. Additionally, Crazy Egg's visual analytics capabilities allow businesses to track user behavior and optimize the user experience to drive engagement. By understanding how users interact with their website or application, businesses can create a seamless and engaging experience that keeps customers coming back.

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Inspectlet's screen recording and heatmap tools provide businesses with valuable insights into their customers' experiences. With Inspectlet, businesses can watch recordings of user sessions, track user behavior, and analyze the user experience in real-time. This enables businesses to identify areas of their website or application that may be causing frustration or confusion, and make data-driven decisions to enhance customer engagement. Inspectlet also allows businesses to identify patterns in user behavior, allowing them to optimize their customer engagement strategies and improve retention.

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Warehouses

Customer data can come from a wide variety of sources, and it's crucial to have a reliable and scalable way to store and manage that data. This is where data warehouses come in - they allow you to store large amounts of customer data in one place, making it easier to analyze and derive insights from. In this section, we'll cover some of the most popular data warehouses used by Twilio Segment customers today, including BigQuery, Postgres, Redshift, and Snowflake.

Recipe

Fill the gaps in your profiles using data from your warehouse

In this recipe, you’ll set up rETL to automatically pull in both backfill customer data and events from your warehouse to help complete your identity graph and provide a holistic view of your customer’s journey over an extended period of time.

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BigQuery is a powerful data warehouse offered by Google Cloud that enables businesses to analyze large datasets quickly and efficiently. With BigQuery, businesses can store, manage, and query their data, making it easy to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and improve their marketing efforts. BigQuery is highly scalable, allowing businesses to easily handle large volumes of data, and is compatible with a wide range of third-party tools and services.

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Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that is designed to be highly scalable, efficient, and easy to use. With this cloud warehouse, businesses can store and manage their data with ease, making it easy to access and analyze customer data. Additionally, Snowflake offers a range of advanced features, including automatic backups, data sharing, and multi-cluster warehousing.

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PostgreSQL is an open-source relational database management system that is highly customizable and scalable. With PostgreSQL, businesses can store and manage their data with ease, making it easy to access and analyze customer data. PostgreSQL offers a wide range of advanced features, including indexing, replication, and transaction control.

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Databricks is a unique cloud-based warehouse platform, created by the founders of Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and MLflow. It integrates data warehouses, data lakes, and AI into a single, open platform designed for data and AI workloads. By linking with Twilio Segment, Databricks facilitates the collection, governance, and activation of first-party customer data directly within the data warehouse.

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Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse offered by Amazon Web Services that enables businesses to store and analyze large datasets quickly and efficiently. With Redshift, businesses can easily scale their data warehouse to meet their needs, making it an ideal choice for enterprise businesses.

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