With Presence in 35+ Countries, Marketing Automation Platform WebEngage Serves Over 40K Businesses Across the Globe

WebEngage, a Mumbai-based full-stack marketing automation platform that helps B2C companies drive more revenue from their existing customers and anonymous users, currently serves over 40,000 businesses around the world. With presence in 35+ countries, WebEngage works with brands such as Flipkart, eBay, GoIbibo, Myntra, MakeMyTrip, Taj Hotels etc. in India as also with companies in the US, Middle East and South East Asia such as Pluralsight, Avaya, Sendgrid, Souq, Vogue, Unilever, amongst others.
“We grew 300% in the last year. We track 350 million online users as of this month. We continue to grow steadily as more and more brands come to know about us and recognize the potential that Marketing Automation has to supercharge business growth consistently at scale,” said Avlesh Singh, Co-Founder & CEO, WebEngage in an interaction with BW Disrupt.
Founded by Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja in 2011, WebEngage is a cross-channel user engagement platform which intelligently automates communication across users’ life-cycle. It enables companies to enhance their brand experience with contextual, personalised user engagement via In-App Messages, Push Notifications, Emails and Text Messages and Web Messages (notification, survey and feedback).
Recently, WebEngage has been roped in by OTA major Goibibo to power the brand’s User & Partner engagement strategy and execution. Online fashion retail major Myntra has also chosen to employ the services of Marketing Automation platform WebEngage to power their User Engagement strategy.
“After using WebEngage,Tata-owned Starquik improved their customer acquisition by massive 2300% and India’s second largest OTA Yatra increased its gross hotel bookings by 3.2%,” added Avlesh.
“WebEngage is looking to take the entire Marketing Cloud suite to some of the world’s most exciting and regions around the world that are experiencing rapid growth. We have felt some steady traction from the South East Asia and GCC markets. We are focussed on doubling down our efforts into expanding our operations here and create a niche for ourselves.”
In February 2018, WebEngage had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Social Capital, the Palo Alto-based VC firm backed by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. The funding will be used to build upon the product pipeline for 2018.
The startup had also raised Seed funding early on from a group of angel investors at the Indian Angel Network (IAN), led by Rajan Anandan. Other investors Rehan Yar Khan (Managing partner, Orion Venture Partners), Blume Ventures, and GTI Capital Group also participated in the round.
In February 2016, Bangalore-based CRM solutions provider, Capillary Technologies Pvt Ltd had also partnered with the SaaS startup and picked up an undisclosed minority stake in it.
When Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja decided to strike out on their own in September 2010, it was their work experience in various startups that they banked upon to find success. The two founded Webklipper Technologies, a software product development firm. After experimenting for a year, in October 2011, they launched WebEngage, a user engagement product aimed at helping e-commerce companies better engage with their users.
Before launching WebEngage, Singh and Utreja worked with restaurant aggregator Burrp which was later acquired by online movie and event ticketing platform BookMyShow in July 2017 from Network18 in an all-cash deal.
While speaking about their target market & marketing strategies, Avlesh added, “Companies that have a business to do online or via a mobile app are our target market. We help them engage with their users meaningfully. Product and marketing teams at these companies find utility in our product, which in turn helps them improve engagement and retention.
A large chunk of our customers come from the e-commerce, travel, banking/insurance, fin-tech and ed-tech domains. More often than not, these are large consumer businesses who use the WebEngage platform to engage meaningfully with their user base, which can be anywhere from a few thousand users or even several million in number.
Our marketing strategy is centered around content marketing. We have a highly informational blog that regularly churns our highly compelling content custom-made for our target audience (C-Suite execs, Marketing & Product Managers). Such people are in the habit of reinforcing their own beliefs with knowledge and scourge the Internet to try and find more information about certain topics. We aim to identify relevant topics that are related to the Marketing Automation industry and create high-quality content that is informative and fresh. It helps us generate a healthy pipeline of prospects and also build thought leadership in the industry.”
WebEngage is focused on India, S.E.Asia, Middle East and Europe as its target markets. About 35% of its revenue comes from India and the startup is targeting to receive 75% of its revenue from the US and Europe, up from about 40% currently.
With offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru in India, WebEngage is a SaaS product with an annual subscription fee that depends on the number of users its clients have for their own product. “We offer brands the capability to target and analyze each user that they account for on their own platform, and that forms the basis of our monetization policy as well,” mentioned Avlesh.
“Marketing automation is a crowded space at the moment. There are multiple niche categories in which several brands are operating. Today, you will find categories like bulk marketing tools, mobile marketing suite, and analytics tools to name a few. Companies like Braze, Mixpanel, Localytics etc are solving parts of this problem.
Then come the Enterprise tools that are focusing on solving the omnichannel experience problems. Adobe, Salesforce, IBM etc have built their marketing cloud by building/acquiring companies over a period of time. Needless to say, these products are overly complicated and expensive for a mid-sized company.
We are building a true cross-channel marketing automation product for the new age tech business which is simple and easy to use. Our main focus is to create a highly versatile and powerful product that is incredibly easy to use and integrates easily with any platform. Most platforms today have only one of those qualities, and that is the gap that we are trying to fill.”
WebEngage is having 85 people strong team split across engineering, product, design, marketing, sales, customer success, finance and customer support.
Commenting on the metrics that matter the most for WebEngage as a business, Avlesh stated, “Customer satisfaction and stickiness are the most important metric for us. We obsess over this in all our functions. Being a retention marketing platform, we understand the importance of giving our users a delightful user experience. It is highly important to offer a customized level of service to users so that they feel satisfied with your product. This is how we have managed to build brand loyalty in such a competitive market.”