11 Attentive alternatives for SMS, email & omnichannel marketing

Attentive is one of the pioneering SMS marketing platforms founded in 2016. The company has remained a leader in the SMS marketing space due to its strong customer support and extensive features like bulk SMS, two-way messaging, SMS personalization, and more.

However, many brands are looking for Attentive alternatives that offer:

• Advanced email marketing capabilities. While Attentive has an email marketing tool, it’s still very limited compared to other solution providers.
• More robust reporting features for analyzing campaign performance, uncovering customer insights, and creating custom dashboards.
• Additional channels, like on-site, mobile apps, push notifications, online ads, or WhatsApp. This is a must for enterprise marketing teams looking to consolidate their martech stack and maximize their budgets.
• More transparent and affordable pricing plans for small businesses and individual creators.

In this guide, we’ve gathered the 11 best Attentive alternatives and competitors for small, midsized, and enterprise brands. Here are all the options we’ll discuss:

1. Insider
2. Twilio
3. Braze
4. WebEngage
5. OneSignal
6. Klaviyo
7. Omnisend
8. Emotive
9. SimpleTexting
10. SlickText
11. Textedly

The first four options are omnichannel engagement platforms that support email and SMS while offering other tools for web personalization, push notifications, WhatsApp marketing, and more. This makes them a good fit for digital marketing teams looking to get additional capabilities that Attentive doesn’t offer.

The other seven are mainly email, SMS, and push notification tools that have most of Attentive’s main features and templates. They’re a better fit for small teams needing a more cost-effective solution or for companies looking to replace Attentive without requiring additional functionality.

1. Insider

Channels: Web, mobile app, email, SMS, web and mobile app push notifications, chatbots, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Instagram, and online ads.

Insider is our AI-led platform that unifies customer data, predicts future behaviors with AI, and lets you build personalized omnichannel campaigns across 12+ channels.

Over 1200 enterprise brands like Adidas, Toyota, Allianz, GAP, and Unilever use our platform to:

• Create personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints that drive conversions, revenue, and retention.
• Stitch together every single customer interaction to build a clear picture of customers’ behaviors, interests, needs, and preferences.
• Orchestrate tailored customer journeys across email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and other touchpoints using a simple drag-and-drop editor and a plethora of proven templates.
• Consolidate their martech stack to improve efficiency, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and drive a higher marketing return on investment (ROI).
• And much more.

Due to Insider’s versatility, personalization capabilities, and excellent customer support, customers and industry experts rank our platform at the top of categories like:

• Omnichannel marketing platforms by IDC.
• Personalization engines by Gartner.
• Marketing automation by G2.

In the next sections, you’ll learn how Insider can help you grow your email and SMS contact base and create high-converting campaigns across both channels. 

We’ll also show you how to use our platform to extend your personalization efforts across all touchpoints to drive more customer engagement, revenue, and loyalty.

Grow your contact base with engaging opt-in templates

Insider makes it easy to speed up lead collection on your website or mobile app with proven opt-in templates. For example, you can add standard lead collection pop-ups or use gamification to grow your subscriber list by:

• Letting visitors choose a gift themselves via the “Pick a Gift” template.
• Prompting visitors to spin a wheel and win a prize via the “Wheel of Fortune” template.

These templates are easily customizable based on your needs. Plus, with our intuitive no-code tools, you can launch lead collection campaigns on your site or app without needing technical assistance.

Yves Rocher used the Wheel of Fortune exit pop-up to encourage website visitors to leave their emails. This helped the brand achieve a 6% increase in lead generation and get an additional touchpoint for converting leads into customers.

Unify your customer data and segment your audiences

Making the most of your marketing efforts requires delivering relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations to the right audiences, on the right channels.

That’s only possible when you have reliable data about the entire customer journey — from the first interactions with your brand to recent purchases, website activities, and channel preferences. 

For many brands, that data is siloed off in different solutions, e.g., an email and SMS platform like Attentive, an analytics tool, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and other point solutions. 

This means marketers often work off an incomplete view of their customers’ journeys, resulting in generic campaigns that don’t produce the desired results.

That’s why Insider lets you unify your data into a customer data platform (CDP) using 100+ premade connectors from our Integrations Hub.

Our CDP can aggregate data from any online and offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, APIs, analytics platforms, email marketing tools, and more — to give you 360-degree customer views filled with insights like:

• Last visited, purchased, and abandoned products.
• Channel reachability and interactions (e.g., across email, SMS, and web push).
• Customer lifecycle stage and predictive characteristics such as likelihood to purchase.

Put simply, these profiles serve as a foundation for understanding your customers and delivering truly personalized experiences at every turn. 

Our platform also comes with advanced segmentation capabilities for finding the right customers to target with each message or campaign. 

For example, say you’re running an SMS marketing campaign aimed at re-engaging dormant customers. Insider helps you home in on the right audiences by segmenting via:

• Devices, locations, demographics, website and mobile app interactions, interactions across communication channels, and other standard characteristics.
• Predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to engage or purchase, discount affinity, lifecycle status, and potential lifetime value. This means you can target only the customers who are likely to respond to your messages, which leads to higher conversion rates, more revenue, and better budget utilization.

Create personalized emails and SMS messages in minutes

Insider lets you create any type of email or SMS campaign — from highly-targeted promotional messages for driving sales to bulk and transactional SMS flows for reaching large numbers of people and providing real-time updates.

Our platform makes it easy to personalize each message to its recipient. For example, if you’re building an SMS message, you can easily add dynamic links to last visited categories, last abandoned products, coupons, and much more with a simple drag-and-drop editor.

This capability lets you deliver relevant messages that drive sales and maximize your marketing efforts. 

For instance, you can easily build an automated SMS campaign that sends a message to all customers interested in a specific product whenever its price gets reduced or it gets restocked.

Our platform also offers different unsubscribe options depending on your needs. You can choose to let customers unsubscribe by sending a keyword or by going to a custom landing page built with our platform.

The process of creating personalized emails is just as easy. You can simply drag-and-drop elements like images, buttons, videos, banners, and personalized product recommendations into each email.

Plus, with AMP emails, you can also add interactive product carousels, accordions, and forms. This lets customers browse products, submit survey responses, and complete bookings without leaving your emails, leading to much higher completion and conversion rates.

You can also add another layer of personalization and urgency to each email with real-time countdown times, open-time personalization, and recommendations based on each recipient’s preferences.

Lastly, Insider offers granular email and SMS analytics that show you how each channel is performing and let you drill down into specific campaigns. You can easily track metrics like deliverability, open rates, clickthrough rates (CTR), conversion rates, revenue, and more.

Scale your personalization efforts across all channels

As a true omnichannel solution, Insider offers access to 12+ channels from one place. This means you can use our platform to reach users with targeted content, messaging, and product recommendations across your: 

• Website and mobile app by tailoring all elements to users’ needs and preferences. For example, you can deliver personalized product recommendations, show tailored site search results, optimize categories, and much more. This is essential if you want to maximize your marketing spend and website conversion rates.

• Push notifications by using targeted web and mobile pushes to attract users’ attention and get them back to your site or app. Web push notifications are extremely useful for converting anonymous visitors into paying customers faster and cheaper while mobile app pushes are fantastic for generating engagement and revenue.

• Online ads by targeting customer segments built with Insider with relevant Google, Facebook, and TikTok ads. For example, you can optimize your ad spend and acquisition costs by only showing ads to users who’ve displayed an interest in a specific item while also being likely to make a purchase.

• Messaging channels by sending personalized messages and setting up automated flows across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Instagram, chatbots, and others. You can use these channels alongside SMS and email to promote new releases, generate leads, have two-way customer conversions, and much more.

• Customer conversations by offering immediate answers and guidance with AI-powered conversations. Our platform can help you support teams reduce response times and improve customer satisfaction by predicting queries, automating repetitive responses, and more. Explore our Conversational CX offering here.

For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to delivering personalization at scale.

Build automated, high-converting campaigns with proven templates and AI optimizations

Our customer journey builder makes it easy to build and automate simple workflows and omnichannel campaigns. 

You can simply drag and drop and choose elements like channels, conditions, wait times, and more to create journeys tailored to your customers’ needs and preferences.

You can also view the results of each campaign right inside Architect by analyzing how many users entered each step and where most drop-offs occur. 

If you’re performing a more granular analysis, our customer journey analytics software lets you drill down into individual flows and create custom dashboards with metrics like conversion rates, customer retention, customer lifetime value (CLTV), and more.

For a real example of Architect’s power, refer to our case studies with:

• Slazenger: This sportswear brand used Architect to bring back cart abandoners and entice shoppers to make additional purchases with personalized emails, SMS messages, and web push notifications. The result was a 700% increase in customer acquisition and a 49x ROI in eight weeks.
• Generali: This insurance company used our platform to validate leads for its sales teams, segment them, and target each segment with relevant emails, push notifications, and SMS messages. This resulted in a 20% reduction in sales cycle length.
• NA-KD: This eCommerce brand used Insider to expand its reach across five channels — email, web push, app push, SMS, and WhatsApp — with personalized automated campaigns. The company’s new approach to omnichannel marketing led to a 25% increase in CLTV and 72x ROI in 12 months.

Templates for all channels and use cases

Just like our templates for email and SMS, Insider offers a plethora of premade templates for Architect. These cover a whole range of goals, channels, and industries, like:

• Enticing users to come back to the site with targeted price drop or back-in-stock notifications.
• Celebrating customer milestones like birthdays or anniversaries with discounts and other rewards.
• Increasing average order value (AOV) by upselling or cross-selling relevant items across the channels customers prefer.

Put simply, Insider ensures you don’t have to build journeys from scratch. As an aside, if you already have automated flows or campaigns in other tools — including Attentive — our customer support team will migrate them to our platform for you.

AI-powered creation, optimizations, and experiments

Insider comes with versatile tools and features for taking advantage of AI’s full marketing potential. You can rely on our platform’s AI to:

• Generate segments, journeys, images, and copy: Our patent-pending Generative AI solution (Sirius AI™) can create customer segments, journeys, images, and text based on simple text prompts. This can help you drastically speed up campaign creation and achieve up to 60% higher productivity.

• Select the best channels and optimal send times: Insider can analyze users’ behavioral banners to select and automatically trigger messages on the channels and at the times they’re most likely to engage. This can save you days of guessing and manual testing of channels and send times.

• Run A/B tests at scale: Insider comes with built-in A/B testing for comparing subject lines, body copy, images, and channels. Our AI can also optimize your journeys based on the results of each experiment, so you don’t have to do so manually. All you need to do is select a winning metric (e.g., open rates, conversion rates, or revenue) and a duration for the test to you.

For more details:

• Explore what makes our platform different. 
• Learn how Insider compares to other omnichannel solutions.
• Book a free personalized demo to see how our platform can help you achieve your business goals.

2. Twilio

Channels: Email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, chatbots, voice, and video.

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that owns SendGrid (an email marketing solution) and Segment (a CDP). The platform is mostly known for its APIs for different communication channels, including email and SMS. For companies that don’t want to rely solely on APIs, Twilio offers Engage — a native CDP and omnichannel marketing platform for capturing data and activating it across different channels.

3. Braze

Channels: Email, SMS, WhatsApp, LINE, web and mobile app messaging, and online ads.

Braze is a customer engagement platform used by companies in industries such as retail and eCommerce, financial services, travel and hospitality, and media. It offers tools for:

• Data aggregation and reporting.
• Data activation across channels.
• Journey orchestration and experimentation. 

Besides its features for reaching customers across email, SMS, WhatsApp and other communication channels, Braze offers some website engagement and personalization tools (although they are quite limited).

Learn more: 11 Braze alternatives for cross-channel marketing.

4. WebEngage

Channels: Email, SMS, web push, online ads, mobile push, and in-app messaging.

WebEngage is a cross-channel customer engagement platform with tools for data unification, segmentation, personalization, marketing automation, and analytics. It supports multiple channels including email and SMS and offers tools for personalizing web and mobile app experiences. It can also integrate with Facebook and Google Ads to improve targeting precision.

Learn more: 7 WebEngage alternatives for customer engagement.

5. OneSignal

Channels: Email, SMS, web push, mobile push, and in-app messaging.

OneSignal is a multichannel marketing software. It has traditionally been focused on web and mobile app push notifications and is one of the most advanced solutions in these categories. The company has expanded into other channels like email and SMS while also offering features for live mobile app activities.

OneSignal’s free plan is among the most generous ones with 10,000 monthly email sends and unlimited mobile push sends. Paid plans start at $9/month.

6. Klaviyo

Channels: Email, SMS, and mobile push notifications.

Klaviyo is one of the most popular email and SMS marketing platforms. It’s focused on eCommerce businesses, especially ones using Shopify. In recent years, Klaviyo has expanded to other channels and tools, including:

• Reviews.
• Web forms.
• Mobile push notifications.

Klaviyo has a free plan for 500 monthly email sends, while its paid plans start at $45/month. However, its pricing scales as the number of contacts in your base grows, which can make it a very expensive solution as you scale your campaigns.

Learn more: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types.

7. Omnisend

Channels: Email, SMS, and web push notifications.

Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing platform for eCommerce businesses. It helps brands create integrated email and SMS campaigns using pre-made templates, automations, and segmentation. Omnisend also supports web push notifications as a channel and offers a tool for collecting and highlighting reviews across your website or emails.

Omnisend offers a free plan for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails and push notifications per month. Paid plans start at $16/month and include 24/7 live chat and email customer support.

8. Emotive

Channels: SMS.

Emotive is an SMS marketing tool. It offers standard SMS capabilities that most other solutions have while also adding unique ones like CartAI which helps brands drive 20% more email and SMS revenue by recovering abandoned carts with the help of AI. Emotive also offers a dedicated staff of SMS marketing experts — called TextPros — which companies can leverage for services like onboarding, copywriting, building custom popups, A/B testing, and more.

The pricing for Emotive’s SMS offering starts at $100/month, which includes dedicated onboarding and a dedicated customer success manager.

9. SimpleTexting

Channels: SMS.

SimpleTexting is an SMS marketing service and texting platform with features for business, franchise, and enterprise texting. It offers mass texting for reaching thousands of contacts, two-way messaging for having conversations with customers, and basic personalization features like data collection, segmentation, and drip campaigns. Companies can also use it to send text-to-win, text-to-vote, and text-to-join messages.

SimpleTexting offers a free trial and customizable pricing plans starting at $39/month for 500 credits, where one SMS message uses up one credit and one MMS message uses three.

10. SlickText

Channels: SMS.

SlickText is an SMS marketing service with features like:

• Autoresponders.
• Text surveys.
• Text to join.
• Text to win.
• QR codes.

It also helps brands personalize their SMS campaigns by storing some customer information and inserting merge tags to automatically tailor individual messages. Besides its SMS capabilities, SlickText lets brands create website popups for capturing visitors’ information.

SlickText offers a free trial and eight paid plans starting at $29/month for 500 monthly texts.

11. Textedly

Channels: SMS.

Textedly is a simple, easy-to-use text marketing platform for sending bulk SMS and MMS mobile text messages. Besides its standard text marketing capabilities, Textedly offers features for:

• Text-to-pay by scheduling reminders and sending effective payment nuggets.
• Collecting, managing, and monitoring online reviews using text message links.
• Monitoring all customer conversations from one omnichannel inbox and assigning specific conversations to teammates. 

Textedly a free plan for sending up to 50 text messages and seven paid plans starting as low as $26/month. 

Personalize your SMS, email, and omnichannel campaigns with Insider

Insider gives you access to Attentive’s main channels and capabilities — including email, SMS, marketing automation, and AI-powered content generation — while also offering a plethora of other channels and tools for creating high-performing campaigns.

This makes Insider an ideal alternative to Attentive for midsized and enterprise brands looking to:

• Consolidate their customer data in a true enterprise CDP and get 360-degree customer views.
• Segment their audiences using standard, predefined, and AI-powered predictive characteristics for precise customer targeting.
• Maximize their email and SMS marketing spend by coordinating their efforts between both channels.
• Get access to other communication channels from one platform, like push notifications, online ads, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
• Speed up campaign creation with proven templates for different channels, industries, and use cases.
• Personalize all customer touchpoints — including their websites and mobile apps — to maximize their conversion rates and marketing budgets.

Lastly, our global customer support teams will ensure you can deploy Insider and see value from our platform as fast as possible.Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.