Peter Drucker once said “the purpose of business is to create and keep customers” and going by this saying, several businesses are waking up to attend the constantly changing needs and demands of the customer landscape. Today, businesses have embellished their marketing strategies to target potential customers by gaining insights from data deluge. Most of the existing data analytics solutions have the capability to dice and slice the content and draw meaning out of it. However, they lack the capability of deriving value from that data by acting on it. WebEngage, headquartered in Mumbai, India provides “on-site customer engagement services” with web analytics to help its customers profile their website visitors while engaging and assisting them at the right points throughout their online journey. WebEngage enables a website marketing manager to engage with the visitor by showing targeted messages based on user behavior on the website (eg, showing real time offers based on how long the user has stayed on a web page) and get feedback from users based on user activity (eg, when a user on e-commerce website has added item in shopping cart and is about to leave to know the reason as to why he is leaving.) “We are positioned as virtual salesperson for e-Commerce clients and envision ourselves as one stop solution for issues on website such as shopping cart abandonment, high bounce rate, leaking sales funnel, getting customer feedback, pushing real time messaging to site visitors”, quotes Avlesh Singh, Co-founder & CEO at WebEngage.

The founders of WebEngage, Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja, the CTO, while they were working as employees at Burrp.com were quick to realise about the roadblocks faced by marketing team at Burrp. “Marketing team at Burrp.com would find it difficult to get any promotion up and running on our own website (Burrp.com) due to dependency on the IT team for deployment”, says Avlesh. These two fervent employees of Burrp did not hesitate to curtail the bottlenecks and forayed to create user friendly DIY (do-it-yourself) software to enable even non-technical users to use and run the software in a matter of minutes. The software became an instant hit within the marketing team of Burrp as the team was now able to run and measure the effectiveness of their marketing and sales experiments. Both Avlesh and Ankit sensed the immense opportunity within this endeavour and thus came up with the idea of “WebEngage” which could drive sales and conversions on the client’s website by allowing him/her to push targeted offers, discounts and messages to users on his/her website.

Like every other startup, WebEngage too had its share of waxes and wanes owing to lack of capital, good quality talent and difficulty in retaining few existing customers. However, the company soon got to witness its crowning moments when Rajan Anandan, an active angel investor of early stage technology companies offered to lead the first round of its funding. The funds received were utilized in expanding product offering, creating technology differentiators and human capital. Following this, WebEngage launched its “Push Notification” product that helps the customer to create short notifications to target specific set of audience and consequently optimizes conversion. “Since customers got ROI from this product from day one, it made an instant connect. We haven't looked back since then”, Avlesh added

Some of the leading global and Indian companies from ecommerce, travel, real estate and product sector such as Flipkart, Myntra, Makemytrip, eBay, Avaya, Intuit, Airtel, Foodpanda and Snapdeal who are not only relishing WebEngage’s products focused on customer engagement – feedback and contextual surveys but also making their businesses effective. The company’s customer engagement service functions by targeting website visitors based on source of their visit (google search, referral website etc), no. of pages visited within the website, time spent on the website, value of items within their shopping cart etc. This feature aids the customers to acquire more clients as well retain the existing ones.

The company is looking to expand geographically across US, UK and SE Asia. With tonnes of data exploding from each website, WebEngage envisions to set up Data Lab to further help its customers make sense of the enormous amount of data from transactions happening globally. The company is focused on Mobile Apps domain with product to help improve customer engagement in the buoyant mobile app market and has plans to launch it by March 2015.