Marketing technology, or martech, is the software a company uses to send messages to its customers, to know who each customer is, and to get customers to come back. It decides who receives which offer, on which channel and at what moment. Then it measures whether the offer worked.
Imagine you add a pair of running shoes worth ₹3,499 to the basket of a shopping app, and then close the app without buying. That night, a push notification arrives: the price has dropped. The next morning, an email says your basket is waiting. Two days later, a WhatsApp message offers ₹300 off. No employee at the shop typed any of these messages. Software sent them, and it stopped as soon as you bought the shoes.
Martech has three zones. The first is customer engagement, the software that sends the messages. A customer engagement platform sorts an app's users into groups, and sends each group a planned series of push notifications, emails, SMS and in-app messages. A WhatsApp marketing platform does similar work on WhatsApp, where most Indian customers can be reached. Using several channels in one plan is called omnichannel engagement.
The second zone is customer data. To the shoe shop, you may look like four different people: an email address, a phone number, an app on a phone and a browser cookie. A customer data platform (CDP) joins these four into one profile. This joining is called identity resolution. An identity graph does the same job across many companies, so that an advertiser can recognise its own customer on a news website.
The third zone is loyalty and rewards. Loyalty programme software gives you points for each purchase, and moves you to a higher tier, with bigger discounts, when you spend more. A rewards platform sends you a gift card when a friend you referred signs up.
All three zones depend on first-party data. This is the data a company collects itself, from its own app, its website and its billing counter. It matters more every year, because two major browsers now restrict third-party cookies, the small files that let advertisers follow a person from one website to another. Safari blocks all third-party cookies by default. Firefox blocks the cookies of known tracking companies by default. It also keeps every other third-party cookie separate for each website, so the cookie cannot follow a person to other sites. Chrome, the most used browser in India, still allows third-party cookies, because Google decided in April 2025 to keep them. India's data protection law, the DPDP Act, also requires a company to take the customer's consent before it uses personal data for marketing. This duty applies from 13 May 2027.
Most martech is sold as software as a service (SaaS). The company pays a monthly fee, which often depends on how many customers it sends messages to. Indian companies have built several of the large products in this field, especially for engagement and loyalty. The newest change is that an AI model, not a marketer, chooses the message for each customer. The page on AI decisioning explains how this works.