Introducing Twilio Engage: The First Growth Platform Built on Top of a CDP

For more than 12 years, Twilio's been building the world’s leading cloud communication platform. But our vision is about more than communication: it's about end-to-end customer engagement, ultimately providing businesses with the holy grail – hyper-personalized communications at every step of the customer journey. 

Understanding your customers is critical to a successful customer engagement strategy, but information about those customers – what they browsed, when they bought, how they used your apps and websites, and more – is usually siloed across dozens of software systems inside your company. 

When Twilio acquired Segment back in November 2020, our goal was to bring customer data into the hands of builders so they could unlock delightful experiences for their customers. 

That’s why we’re so excited to announce Twilio Engage — the first of many products to help us realize this mission.

Your marketing is only as good as your data

As reported in the 2021 State of Customer Engagement Report, the average number of digital touchpoints increased by 63% in 2020, while the volume of digital interactions increased by 54%.

While this flurry of digital interaction has given companies a goldmine of customer data, few businesses have the required technology to leverage it. Almost half of organizations (43%) say getting accurate customer data for personalization is a challenge. 

The unspoken truth is: most existing tools weren't built for a digital-first era, and they can't handle the billions of available data points. 

15 or 20 years ago, when the legacy marketing clouds reigned supreme, the world was a very different place. Customer engagement – if you could call it that – involved rudimentary automation on email lists: simply upload a CSV of email addresses and blast your customers with a one-size-fits-all message (okay, maybe throw in a bit of code to display their first name).

So what do companies do?

In most cases, companies are forced to bolt customer data onto their legacy marketing cloud. This involves the time-consuming process of downloading CSVs from the data science team then chasing down the engineering department to run SQL queries on top of a data warehouse... by which time the data you’re using is hopelessly out of date.

You just can’t do real-time, hyper-personalization at scale with a bolt-on solution.

That’s why we built Twilio Engage — an omnichannel growth platform that empowers businesses to use any combination of tools, data integrations, analytics, and channels they need to build and optimize marketing campaigns, faster than ever before. 

Empowering Developers and Marketers to build faster 

If you’ve used the Segment Customer Data Platform before, you have experienced firsthand how Segment enables developers to unify customer data from every customer touchpoint. The Segment CDP empowers marketing, sales, and customer service leaders with the insights they need to design and build relevant, data-driven customer engagement. Twilio Engage puts that same promise of data-driven customer engagement into the hands of even more builders. 

Companies can now get both; the flexibility that only comes from custom software development and the speed of a packaged solution. 

Are you a marketer? Design campaigns on your own without the help of a data scientist. 

On the data team? Pulling customer lists for marketers every other day is a thing of the past.

Twilio Engage delivers real-time customer data within the UI, removing data team dependencies and empowering marketers to design engagement strategies across all channels and integrations from a single platform.

With Twilio Engage, you can go from idea to campaign in minutes instead of weeks.

Image: Twilio Engage Audience Builder

Data and communications in one platform 

Twilio Engage brings together the best data and the best communication layer for marketers to activate personalized customer experiences. Using Twilio Engage, you’ll discover all kinds of untapped potential throughout your organization, particularly: 

• Know your customers: Go from idea to campaign in minutes with real-time, unified customer profiles. 

• Personalize every interaction in one place: Centrally plan your marketing strategy across all channels and gain visibility for your entire team. 

• Activate anywhere: Build tailored campaigns for your use case on the most extensible platform with 400 out-of-the-box integrations with all your favorite tools.

• Reach every customer, every time: Deliver personalized engagement using direct channels built on the APIs trusted to send billions of communications every day. 

• Measure beyond the click: Understand your full ROI story and invest your budget accordingly. 

SMS Builder with Campaign Conversion Data 

We’re just getting started 

Twilio Engage is now in Pilot while we work with a select group of users to round out the feature set and user experience. We’re thrilled to get Twilio Engage into the hands of marketers soon with a limited access Private Beta offering. If your organization is interested in taking part, request to join the beta and we’ll keep you up to date as we’re able to expand access. 

In the meantime, learn about how Segment Customer Data Platform can impact your business by getting a Product Tour. 

We can’t wait to see what you build!