In a world increasingly dominated by screens and digital media, businesses have to make the most of their online real estate in order to engage with customers on their preferred channels and broaden their audience. In order to make the most of the resources available to them, organizations might invest in a customer engagement marketing platform. As engineers continue developing ways to harvest valuable customer data, businesses must also strive to utilize that data to better inform marketing and customer engagement decisions, which is where Twilio comes in.
Twilio is an industry-leading resource for brands and organizations small and large to develop better customer engagement techniques so that those businesses can create meaningful and measurable moments with users from around the world. The Twilio API-first approach has allowed the Twilio marketing platform – and the Twilio customer engagement platform – to grow and adapt to the flexible and capable entity it is today providing communications solutions to organizations from all over the globe.
Twilio Products – including Messaging, SendGrid, Engage, Segment, and others – come together to form the first omnichannel marketing automation platform with native CDP capabilities. Such a robust lineup of products and tools is partly why Twilio is known for democratizing channels like chat, text, email, voice, and video through APIs, empowering businesses to create meaningful interactions with clients on their preferred channel(s).
Together, all of these services and products comprise the Twilio Super Network, which is a formidable nexus of connectivity between the Internet and more traditional telecommunications infrastructure. This allows Twilio customers to devise customer engagement initiatives and campaigns to reach their target audiences virtually any time and through almost any channel. And because Twilio’s marketing platform has a 24/7 global operations center with experienced and dedicated engineering teams, customer support is highly accessible while providing unparalleled redundancy, security, and uptime.
There are thousands of Twilio customer stories with more than a handful from internationally-known brands and organizations talking about the success they’ve experienced and the positive impact Twilio has had on their growth initiatives and customer engagement system.
Twilio Segment is the foundation of the entire Twilio marketing platform and allows marketing teams the ability to use quality, reliable data to better inform future marketing decisions. Because if you don’t understand virtually everything there is to know about your target audience, there are missed opportunities for chances of engagement. A few missed opportunities here and there may be innocuous enough, but over time these misses can compound. While other businesses (and especially your closest competitors) are likely working to eliminate those missed opportunities and diverting potential clients and sales away from your products and services.
Better understanding your customers and your target audience requires lots of data – information about what products and services your customers have purchased in the past, when they needed to contact customer support, how often they utilize your company’s website or apps, and for what purposes. All of this information is valuable data, and Segment can help connect outdated systems to ensure businesses provide customers with excellent customer service and enhanced customer engagement strategies.
The Twilio-Segment acquisition occurred in November 2020 to implement the world’s leading customer data platform capable of capturing first-party customer data in real-time. Because Twilio and Segment were so similar in their vision, business model, and values, it made sense to combine forces and integrate the two entities’ cultures and products as well.
Twilio and Segment can be optimized further when combined with Twilio Engage to provide well-designed, customized omni channel campaigns across all your customers’ preferred channels (and we’ll discuss Twilio Engage in greater detail a bit later on).
Twilio Segment competitors may provide similar services and comparable customer data platform solutions, but they don’t come close to matching Twilio’s robust array of partners and integration capabilities.
Twilio SendGrid enables marketing teams to send all sorts of emails as a part of an overarching customer engagement scheme. Initially, SendGrid began as a transactional email platform that utilized API calls to send, but it has since evolved to include many more tools and features. SendGrid includes a very simple and easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality and simultaneously gives marketing teams the flexibility they need to compose effective, attractive, and accessible emails.
Since the Twilio-SendGrid acquisition in early 2019, the acquisition has provided developers and clients unmatched access to one of the best all-around customer engagement platforms, especially as it relates to the diversity of communications channels. Additionally, the acquisition provided unrivaled scalability as well as reliability and the ability to deliver consistent, customized messaging via the customer’s preferred channels.
The acquisition also repositioned Twilio in the marketplace by bolstering Twilio’s customer engagement prowess and capabilities. For many modern companies, email comprises a significant portion of their customer engagement strategies. Emails are highly versatile and can provide a variety of opportunities for customer engagement from simple onboarding procedures to newsletters, promotional emails, and much more.
SendGrid allows businesses and developers to reach their customers by voice, SMS, Facebook Messenger, video, WhatsApp, and crucially, email. For companies that want a wide array of communications capabilities for their customer engagement strategies, there’s really no greater alternative. Emails can be delivered in just a few seconds without delay or interruption, and SendGrid’s flexible email API and MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) are powerful features that make email management straightforward.
Twilio SendGrid can also provide businesses with an edge over the competition by improving deliverability and maximizing inbox placement. Marketing teams can improve email campaigns with product recommendations, customer loyalty emails, and weekly or monthly newsletters. Additionally, you can manage transactional emails – like account set-up information, password recovery, shipping notifications, updates to terms of service or privacy agreements, etc. – from the same central location.
For large enterprises or even for smaller businesses with big audiences, managing your messaging systems can become complicated quickly – especially if your business has cultivated audiences overseas. To help maintain order and organization of your messaging initiatives as your organization grows, Twilio provides messaging services and “bundles” of messaging functionality that users can configure and ensure they’re reaching all their intended recipients.
As far as SMS marketing platforms are concerned, Twilio Messaging is one of the best – especially because Twilio humbly originated as a communications platform providing organizations with the tools and abilities to plug messaging capabilities into their businesses with ease – including SMS, phone call, video chat, and more.
Twilio Messaging Services are designed to empower businesses, organizations, or agencies to send messages at scale, across multiple channels, and to numerous destinations (sometimes in different countries). Messaging Services also offer greater message-sending intelligence gathering and content features – like automated number selection – when including Messaging Service information within API requests.
And with Twilio Programmable Messaging, sending and receiving SMS is incredibly simple. Developers can quickly locate the proper documentation, sample code, and the right tools necessary to construct what your business needs without losing valuable time. Twilio also offers guides and sample app tutorials to help developers get started and understand how to put together common features and attributes of communications solutions.
Help boost your marketing team’s customer engagement capabilities by utilizing Twilio SMS marketing tools or implementing a Twilio SMS marketing campaign. If your organization has a need to reach an audience spread out around the international community, Twilio can help streamline and optimize the process to reduce complexity and ensure your organization develops some of the best customer engagement strategies and initiatives.
All of the capabilities of Twilio and Segment come together and coalesce in Twilio Engage – an innovative omnichannel marketing and expansion platform that empowers businesses from small to large to utilize similar types of data integrations, analytics tools, and channels to construct unique and target campaigns. One of the most exciting features of Twilio Engage is that it provides native CDP and native omnichannel integration in one platform.
Twilio Engage documentation helps organizations collect customer data at a centralized location and analyze it in real-time to provide enhanced customer engagements at integral stages throughout the customer journey. Twilio Engage also allows businesses to deepen customer relationships with highly personalized experiences at multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. Those personalized experiences can then provide a wealth of data to help improve future customer engagement initiatives and strategies.
Twilio Engage is so powerful because it contains virtually every necessary component within one platform to help your organization manage its customer engagement initiatives and measure the data generated to help bolster cross-channel campaigns. Marketing teams can quickly and easily orchestrate multichannel experiences based on real-time data. And with over four hundred integrations, your business can send personalized messages via native SMS or email, or even on custom channels.
As far as customer engagement platforms go, there’s only one Twilio. Few competitors can provide even a fraction of the features and capabilities offered by Twilio. For your voice, messaging, video, and authentication needs – there’s no better platform than Twilio Engage. Learn more by visiting the company website and/or signing up for a Twilio Engage demo today to find out how your organization can improve its customer engagement initiatives.