Customer engagement is the part of marketing technology that decides who gets which message, on which channel and at what moment, and then sends it. The channels are push notifications, emails, SMS, WhatsApp messages and messages shown inside an app. The software also records what each person did next: whether they opened the message, came back to the app or bought something.
Different senders need different products. A shopping app or a bank with a crore users uses a customer engagement platform. It sorts users into groups, such as everyone who has not opened the app for 30 days. Then it sends each group a planned series of messages. A marketer draws that series on screen like a flowchart, using journey orchestration.
A small local business, such as a dental clinic or a gym, has no marketing team. Often a marketing agency runs its campaigns for it, on all-in-one marketing software for agencies. That one product holds the customer list, the web pages, the emails and text messages, and the booking calendar.
A company that sells to other companies uses B2B marketing automation. Its buyer is a business, and one purchase can take months to decide. So the software sends useful emails and guides until the buyer is ready for a call from a salesperson. A brand that sells through hundreds of dealers or franchisees uses through-channel marketing to run local advertisements for each of them.
In India, many customers read WhatsApp far more often than email. A WhatsApp marketing platform sends offers to customers who have agreed to receive them, runs a chatbot that takes orders, and keeps every chat in one shared inbox. Buying and selling inside a chat is called conversational commerce.
A message usually leads to a web page. If the page is confusing, the message is wasted. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tests different versions of that page, so that more of the visitors buy.
The products in this zone decide what to send, and to whom. They do not connect to the mobile operators themselves. Every SMS or WhatsApp message that software sends to a person is called application-to-person (A2P) messaging. Messaging companies, such as CPaaS providers, carry these messages to the customer's phone.