MoEngage has a new AI playbook for brands to engage smartly with customers

Ghostly Greetings! Could this Halloween BE anymore Spooky?

This was the message a brand sent to its customer—who was a fan of fictional character Chandler Bing—for Halloween. 

The brand wished to send a customised communication for its Halloween sale and used the ‘Merlin AI’ tool to come up with a clever message coined in the tone of the popular character from the FRIENDS sitcom. 

While any AI writing tool can generate generic text, Merlin AI—a product of customer engagement platform MoEngage—claims to do better. It continuously analyses previous marketing campaigns to understand how a particular customer has interacted with the brand and creates relevant messaging. 

In the above case, Merlin understood—from the customer’s interactions with the brand’s earlier campaigns—that she was a fan of FRIENDS (Chandler in particular) and crafted a message accordingly. The targeted messaging was also accompanied by product recommendations related to the sitcom. 

Merlin is a self-learning GenAI (generative AI) engine that learns from previous campaign data and historical performance records stored within the MoEngage platform. It evaluates metrics such as engagement patterns, conversion and click-through rate. 

Besides using effective keywords, Merlin also avoids words that may create a negative impact on the campaign. In the above example, the tool extracted high-performing words such as ‘spooky’ and ‘ghostly’ and excluded the word ‘fright’.

The same messaging could be tweaked to suit the persona of horror characters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and The Mummy, depending on customer preferences. 

Despite the growing popularity of GenAI, many AI tools often fail to crack the right message. Past campaign data goes unread and the audience’s needs are often unmet. 

This is what Moengageis hoping to address through Merlin AI and its other AI-powered products and ultimately boost engagement with the audience.

Merlin and more

Merlin AI allows marketers to apply filters and criteria to tailor their marketing content—be it emails, push notifications or in-app messages—for specific campaigns, use cases, and audiences. 

“It is said to combine the creative genius of OpenAI(GPT LLM) with campaign performance,” says Raviteja Dodda, CEO and Co-founder, MoEngage. 

The tool helps create personalised push campaigns quickly, leading to better customer engagement and higher response rate and conversion, he adds. 

Launched last year, Merlin has already attracted several customers, including telecom giant Airtel. 

Citing an example, Dodda says a large electronics retailer in Kuwait streamlined its content creation using Merlin. This reduced creation time by 60%, eliminated errors, and boosted push notification conversions by 50%, he adds.

Merlin is just one of the many new products launched by Bengaluru-based MoEngage, built on advanced analytics, automation, and AI-powered recommendations. 

As the customer engagement space heats up with competition from players including CleverTap, WebEngage, and Braze, MoEngage has been steadily carving out a space for itself in the last couple of years.

Armed with a slew of AI-driven products, the SaaS firm aims to help brands provide highly personalised experiences to customers. 

Besides Merlin, the company’s other recent launches include MoEngage for Financial Services, Warehouse Audiences, MoEngage Inform, and MoEngage Personalize. In the last 12 months, MoEngage has added 350 new customers, thanks to its new product suite. 

MoEngage Personalize enables brands to quickly personalise their website and application experiences.     

Recently, retail major Landmark Group used this tool to boost purchases on its app during its White Wednesday Sale. 

Landmark sent push notifications with exclusive offers to customers, encouraging them to take a short survey. Additionally, past data analysed over two weeks helped the retailer understand customer behaviour and engage in effective cross-selling and upselling of products.

In another instance, a top jewellery brand wanted to boost sales during the festive season. It used MoEngage’s personalisation capabilities to show different homepage banners to different customers based on what they looked at and the region they were from. 

MoEngage for Financial Services helps financial firms improve customer engagement using AI and personalised communication across channels. 

For instance, insurance tech platform Policybazaar, which traditionally relied on emails and SMS for customer communication, now uses MoEngage’s product to explore in-app push notifications and stylised templates to create interactive campaigns. 

MoEngage Inform lets brands send real-time alerts across multiple channels using a single API. Otherwise, managing alerts across multiple tools is a complicated process. 

Tata Digital has adopted this feature to ensure reliable message delivery even during high traffic periods on its platform. It can now send over 500 critical alerts, including important updates, security alerts, transaction notifications, and service updates, across 50 Tata brands in real time.  

According to Dodda, MoEngage Inform is already a multi-million-dollar business with over 50 customers. 

MoEngage’s other product Warehouse Audiences helps marketers create targeted customer segments by integrating data from multiple sources, such as CRM systems, social media platforms, website analytics, and sales data, for personalised marketing.

“With so much innovation happening in AI, it’s essential to not only make incremental changes but also rethink things from scratch. These products were born out of the need to help consumer brands create content for campaigns that are guaranteed to provide high CTR, save billable hours (from manual copywriting), reduce manual effort, and drive high ROI,” says Dodda. 

According to Zion Market Research, the size of global AI in marketing is expected to grow from $12.5 billion in 2022 to $72.1 billion by 2030. 

Go-to-market strategy

Founded in 2014 by Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar, MoEngage started out with a focus on mobile applications. Over the course of time, it has expanded its offerings to several channels, including SMS, in-app communication, on-site messages, Facebook, WhatsApp, and email. 

“We have become more of a cross-channel marketing automation platform helping consumer brands better engage with their customers across multiple touchpoints,” says Dodda. 

The firm works with over 1,200 brands globally, including Samsung, Flipkart and Deutsche Telekom. 

In 2022, MoEngage raised $77 million in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Managementand B Capital, with participation from existing investors. 

Multi-geography play is a crucial strategy of the company, with India driving maximum revenue. Southeast Asia and North America are key secondary regions for the firm.   

Over the last four years, MoEngage has seen a seven-fold rise in revenue, driven by rapid expansion across geographies, including North America, Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia and India. 

“Each geography comes with its own market trends and customer preferences, which evolve rapidly. Consumer brands need to be cognisant of shifts in customer behaviour, so they can cater to the needs and wants accordingly,” says Dodda.  

Despite the tough macro conditions around the world, Dodda says MoEngage has seen consistent revenue growth in markets like North America (110-120% in the last 12 months) and EMEA (over 65-70%). 

“We have grown close to 50% year-on-year in terms of revenue while significantly reducing our burn and improving our EBITDA. We aim to double down in North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and India in the coming years, as we have seen a lot of growth momentum in these regions,” he adds. 

(The copy was updated.)