Bangalore, 29 June, 2022: MoEngage, the insights-led customer engagement platform, released the findings of The State of Insights-led Engagement  Report 2022 | India Edition. The report indicates the importance of actionable insights into customer behavior to build an impactful engagement strategy and provide a delightful customer experience.

India is witnessing a digital upsurge with over 749 million internet users in 2020 and the figure is projected to grow to over 1.5 billion users by 2040; an appropriate time for marketers to ramp up their omnichannel customer engagement strategies. 

MoEngage surveyed 2000+ male and female marketers, product managers, and C-level executives in India (across industries like Banking and Finance, Media and Entertainment, Consumer Shopping, and Ed-Tech) to understand their customer engagement approach, the insights they currently analyze, and engagement platforms they use. 

Key outcomes of the report:

1. About 28% of marketers use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms to optimize their marketing initiatives, while the use of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Multichannel Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) was pegged at 22.2% and 21.5%, respectively. 
2. The top challenge for marketers was “real-time analytics” with over 40.2% of them voicing it, followed by issues like “lack of understanding of which channels are most effective” and “inactionable data and unified customer profile data across systems” for 21.5% and 19% of marketers, respectively.
3. Across all industries and company sizes, the most favorite channel for customer touchpoint in a digital omnichannel strategy is email with 16.7% of marketers opting for it, followed by social messaging apps with 16.2% of them going for it, and SMS earning the approval of 15.1% of the marketers.

Current practices are fragmented with limited benefits:   
·     Marketers still depend on CRMs and CDPs, although these stacks are limited in their ability to capture real-time analytics. To keep up and bridge the gaps, marketers need to switch to a more holistic and multichannel alternative – like a CEP. 
·   Indian marketers preferred to capture their customers’ interest, choice, or affinity, including most-viewed content or purchased product and basic demographic data, and personalized their engagement strategies based on customer attributes like language, preferred channel, and content affinity. But they seem to be at a loss when it comes to predicting vital customer actions like churn, dormancy, and conversion to craft personalized customer experiences. 
·     While Indian marketers focus on capturing journey insights like the most optimum path to conversions, they miss on customer-centric insights like Drop-off moments and AHA moments.This indicates an absence of use of machine learning/AI/marketing automation tools to help predict future customer behavior with accuracy to help optimize campaigns accordingly.

Over 50% of survey respondents prioritized communication channels based on customer preferences, a communication strategy that lacks the critical characteristic of a customer-centric approach on how each channel has performed. 

Interestingly, over 42% of marketers feel that capturing customer, campaign and journey insights greatly impacts their business metrics, but, 22% are neutral and the remaining 36% don’t agree that these insights have any impact at all.

Moving to a fully-integrated engagement platform:

The report also establishes ways to help brands move away from their archaic ways of customer engagement and transition to a more insights-led engagement approach: 

a)  Opt for personalized instead of generalized Customer Engagement 

b)  Upgrade your tech stack – switch to CEPs   

c)  Be customer-centric instead of campaign–centric  

d)  Proactive customer engagement to move ahead of competitors

 “The need of the hour is a shift from a campaign-centric approach to an insights-led, customer-centric approach to engagement. Currently, the preferred engagement platforms only give piecemeal solutions resulting in short-term, unsustainable success, while a fully-loaded and multi-channel customer engagement platform yields holistic and intelligent analytics and provides actionable data reflecting rich and delightful customer experience.”

About MoEngage

MoEngage is an intelligent customer engagement platform built for the user-obsessed marketer. With AI-powered customer journey orchestration, personalization capabilities, and in-built analytics, MoEngage enables hyper-personalization at scale across mobile, email, web, SMS, and messaging channels.

Fortune 500 brands and Enterprises across 35+ countries such as Deutsche Telekom, Samsung, Ally Financial, Vodafone, and McAfee, along with internet-first brands such as Sharechat, Roposo, Gaana, Ola, OYO, and Bigbasket, use MoEngage to engage their customers efficiently. MoEngage was named a Leader under Mobile Marketing Platforms in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2020 and a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave Mobile Engagement Automation 2020 reports.

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