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WebEngage, an onsite customer engagement suite and push-engine product aimed at helping ecommerce companies better engage with their users, completes four years of its operation today. Additionally, it has also announced the launch of AppEngage, a mobile marketing automation 2.0 suite which will go beyond the usual event tracking and push notification products.
AppEngage will build enriched profiles for anonymous users and customers using a client’s app. The app will track behaviour and interests to build user profiles. Once a client segments these users, AppEngage will help users automate engagement and communication across their entire life-cycle. The client can use in-app messages, push notifications, emails, text messages, mobile web push and snail mail as the medium of communication.
WebEngage, which helps ecommerce companies to push contextually targeted messages, offers, promotions and questionnaires to users on their website was launched on 13 October 2011. Founded by Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja, who first started it as Webklipper Technologies, WebEngage powers on-site customer engagement and feedback service on 30,000+ websites internationally. The product drives almost 4 Mn users towards the purchase or lead funnel on a daily basis.
Post the launch, the company garnered 100+ installs in the first 3 months and landed its first three paying customers in March 2012. Makemytrip was WebEngage’s first enterprise customer. The firm has since added landed major Indian e-commerce players including Flipkart, Snapdeal, eBay, Jabong, Myntra, Homeshop18 and Yatra as its clients besides many others such as business communication solution provider Avaya and online food delivery marketplace Foodpanda.
The company raised its seed capital from a group of angel investors at the Indian Angel Network (IAN), led by Rajan Anandan – Vice President at Google India in October 2011. The investors included Sunil Kalra, Sadeesh Raghavan, Ashim Mehra, Nitin Singhal, Pradeep Gupta and Harish Mehta. In August 2012, it had raised further funding of close to $384K (INR 2.5 Cr) from Blume Ventures and GTI Capital.
Other noteworthy developments in this space include Flipkart’s acquisition of mobile engagement and marketing automation platform for native mobile apps Appiterate, for an undisclosed amount in April this year. A month later, another Mumbai-based customer engagement platform, Customer360 raised angel funding from its existing investor CCAvenue’s CEO Vishwas Patel.
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