Acoustic alternatives: 8 competitors for customer engagement

Acoustic is a platform that offers email and mobile marketing tools for B2C brands. 

Its products — Acoustic Campaign, Acoustic Connect, DemandTec, and Tealeaf — help teams manage customer data, analyze campaign performance, and drive customer engagement across email, mobile push, SMS, and WhatsApp.

Despite its versatility, Acoustic has some shortcomings. Specifically, some of the products can be difficult to navigate due to UI complexity. Larger teams might also find Acoustic lacking in areas like advanced website personalization, customer support, reporting, and channel versatility.

That’s why in this guide, we’ve gathered the eight best Acoustic alternatives and organized them into two categories:

1. Omnichannel customer engagement platforms — Insider, Braze, MoEngage, Adobe, and Salesforce. These are suitable for midsized and enterprise teams looking for a more versatile platform with broader channel selection, advanced personalization capabilities, and reliable customer support.
2. Email and SMS customer engagement platforms — Keap, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact. These are ideal for smaller businesses that need a more cost-effective solution that still offers customer engagement tools for email and SMS, as well as drag-and-drop editors, segmentation, and premade templates.

We’ll start this guide with Insider — our omnichannel customer engagement platform that fuels journey orchestration across 12+ channels, delivers experiences as unique as each customer, and offers the fastest return on investment (ROI). If you’re interested in learning more, visit our website.

Omnichannel customer engagement platforms for midsized and enterprise teams

These platforms let businesses engage customers across channels like email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, web, and in-app messaging. 

They have personalization, automation, and workflow tools for creating tailored campaigns that respond in real time to customer actions or lifecycle stages. They also let teams unify their customer data, segment audiences, and analyze campaign performance — all from one place.

This makes them a better fit for large organizations looking for a more versatile platform with channels and capabilities that Acoustic doesn’t offer. 

Insider

Insider is our AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. It helps over 1200+ high-growth and enterprise brands like Toyota, Puma, GAP, Samsung, and Coca-Cola:

• Unify customer data from different sources — like CRMs, CMSs, email tools, analytics platforms, and more — and create 360-degree customer views.
• Use that unified data to deliver personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints — including their websites, mobile apps, email, push notifications SMS, WhatsApp, and other channels.
• Reach customers where they are by building seamless omnichannel journeys across 12+ channels with a simple drag-and-drop editor and prebuilt templates for different channels, industries, and use cases.
• Make the most out of their marketing efforts and budget by consolidating their martech stack and personalizing all touchpoints to drive higher engagement, conversion rates, and revenue.
• And much more.

Note: Click here for a direct comparison of Acoustic Campaign and Insider.

Our platform also offers the fastest return on investment (ROI) and is a leader across product categories like customer data platforms (CDPs), personalization engines, omnichannel marketing platforms, and more.

Here are five of the biggest benefits Insider offers as an alternative to Acoustic (and many other omnichannel engagement platforms).

#1 Partner with a world-class customer success team

As we said, Acoustic’s product can be difficult to set up and manage correctly. This is also true for other omnichannel platforms, which is why it’s crucial to partner with an experienced customer success team through the onboarding, deployment, and management processes. 

Insider is an enterprise-grade solution with 1200+ employees over six continents. That lets our teams deliver fast customer service regardless of where you’re located. Plus, all our support teams work in-house, so you don’t have to work with third-party agencies or system integrators.

Our experts guide and assist you through every stage and process, including:

• Setup, migration, and deployment: Our teams ensure you deploy Insider as fast as possible at no extra setup cost. They help you involve the right commercial and technical stakeholders in the process. They also migrate any automated flows or campaigns from different solutions (like Acoustic), so you don’t have to build them from scratch.
• Strategy development and implementation: The growth managers can look at your analytics and customer behavioral data before kick-off. That way, they can give you actionable tactics that can drive results as fast as possible. Plus, they continuously help you analyze results and optimize campaign performance while you’re using Insider.
• Problem resolution: Any questions or issues are quickly resolved by experts deeply familiar with the Insider platform, your marketing goals, and challenges.

Put simply, our best-in-class customer support is among the biggest benefits teams experience when working with us. 

In short, our support teams, alongside the plethora of pre-made templates for all channels and different use cases, make it incredibly easy to build, automate, and optimize omnichannel campaigns with Insider. That’s why customers rank Insider as the best solution when it comes to ease of use, ease of setup, quality of support, and time-to-value.

#2 Access more channels and personalization tools

Insider offers unmatched channel breadth, so you can reach and engage customers on their favourite touchpoints — whether that’s your website and mobile app or communication channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.

Our platform ensures you can make the most out of your efforts by personalizing the entire customer experience across these touchpoints. For example, here are some elements and channels you can personalize with our platform:Web and mobile app product recommendations: You can tap into a plethora of recommendation strategies — like location-based bestsellers, frequently purchased together, or new arrivals — and even have our AI mix and match different ones to achieve optimal results. Avon used our AI-driven product recommendations to achieve a 78% increase in conversions.

• Site search results: Eureka is our AI-powered site search and merchandising tool that recommends relevant products based on past and predicted user behavior. You can use it to improve conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and increase average order value (AOV) by ensuring all visitors find what they’re looking for as fast as possible.

• Emails: You can easily add personalized elements like customers’ names, birthdays, or cart items in each email to increase open and clickthrough rates. You can also expand your product recommendations inside each email and even use AMP to let users browse items, answer questions, and make reservations without leaving your emails.

• Messaging channel communications: Our platform lets you use a plethora of messaging channels — including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and more — to send transactional updates, price drop alerts, back-in-stock alerts, and event reminders. You can also have AI-powered, two-way conversations at scale to market, sell, and answer customers’ questions quickly.

• Push notifications: You can leverage all sorts of web and mobile app push notifications — like recurring, carousels, cart reminders, in-stock alerts, and more — to drive engagement and revenue in a cost-effective way. Marks & Spencer used our web push notifications to achieve a 15.1% cart recovery rate, which is 353x higher than the industry average.

• Online ads: Thanks to our integrations, you can easily build segments with Insider and target them via Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok ads. For example, you can show retargeting ads to users who have completed a specific event (e.g., add-to-cart) and have a high likelihood of purchasing. Pierre Cardin used this strategy to reduce their cost per acquisition by 67.95%.

For more details on this topic, refer to our guide: How to achieve personalization at scale.

#3 Overcome data silos and streamline marketing operations

The ability to deliver highly personalized content, messages, and product recommendations across all channels is only possible through reliable customer data. Insider helps you bring that data from different sources into a single convenient database with an enterprise CDP. 

Our CDP can aggregate data from any online or offline source — including customer relationship management systems (CRMs), content management systems (CMSs), APIs, analytics platforms, point-of-sale devices, customer service tools, other CDPs, and more. Note: You can find a complete list of our premade connectors for popular tools and platforms in our Integration Hub.

The CDP uses this unified data to create 360-degree customer views that give you everything you need to create personalized marketing campaigns. This includes insights like:

• Previous purchases and browsing histories.
• Reachability and interactions across different channels like email, SMS, or WhatsApp. 
• AI-powered predictive marketing characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a channel, discount affinity, and much more.

Plus, having all customer data unified in one place makes it much faster and easier to launch effective campaigns because you don’t have to jump between different tools and painstakingly integrate different data sources. 

For example, Spotlight Retail Group reduced its campaign launch times by 80% thanks to our platform’s ability to track and leverage aggregated, real-time data in a simple and intuitive interface.

#4 Automate omnichannel campaigns with the full power of AI

Insider’s journey orchestration tool lets you create and automate personalized campaigns across all supported channels. 

The process is controlled via a simple drag-and-drop editor. Plus, you can use a plethora of proven templates to ensure you get started and drive results as quickly as possible.

You can trigger each automated flow, user journey, or omnichannel campaign via:

• Events, which can be any actions on your site or app, such as page visits, add-to-cart events, or completed purchases.
• Attribute changes, like a non-regular customer suddenly visiting a product three times a week.
• Price drops.
• And more.

From here, you can select channels, automation triggers, conditions, wait times, and much more. If you’re interested, we encourage you to check out our guides:

• The full guide to marketing automation (Platforms & examples).
• 8 proven eCommerce marketing automation strategies and tools.
• How to use a customer journey builder to boost revenue (with examples).

Architect also comes with built-in AI-powered tools that automate time-consuming aspects of campaign creation and optimization. These include:

• Send-Time Optimization and Next-Best Channel Selection, which analyze users’ behavioral patterns to determine the optimal send times and channels for each message. This can save you weeks of manual experimentation and ensure your campaigns are optimized for engagement and conversions.
• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, which analyzes the results of your A/B tests and automatically guides users to the winning variants. All you need to do is select a duration for the test to run and choose a winning metric, like open rate, conversions rate, revenue, and so on.

• Generative AI, which can build campaign segments, journeys, text, and images using text prompts. You can provide Sirius AI — our patent-pending Generative AI solution — with text prompts that describe your end goal and it will do the heavy lifting of creating customer segments, omnichannel journeys, campaign copy, and images in a matter of seconds.

You can check out our case study with NA-KD for a real-life example of Insider’s omnichannel capabilities.

This eCommerce brand was facing challenges due to its martech stack and customer data being disconnected across various platforms. That made launching campaigns tedious and led to suboptimal results as the company’s marketing team couldn’t tap into the full potential of their customer data.

That’s why they started by unifying their data in our eCommerce CDP. This gave the team a single source of truth for all customer-focused initiatives and made it possible to build relevant experiences at all customer lifecycle stages.

From here, NA-KD used our platform’s broad channel reach to launch hyper-targeted campaigns across email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and app push. This allowed NA-KD’s team to reach customers with the right messages, on the right channels, and at the right times — e.g., while they were browsing the website, chatting on WhatsApp, or scrolling through social media.

Using this new approach NA-KD generated a 25% increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and a 72x ROI in 12 months.To learn how Insider can help your organization achieve key business goals as well, book a free demo with our team.

Braze

Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform designed to help businesses build data-driven marketing campaigns. It allows brands to send relevant messages to users across multiple channels including email, mobile push notifications, in-app messaging, and SMS. Braze’s platform emphasizes mobile marketing and automation, enabling businesses to trigger real-time messages based on customer behavior, lifecycle stage, or other personalized attributes. 

Learn more: 12 Braze alternatives for cross-channel marketing.

MoEngage

MoEngage is an AI-powered customer engagement platform that focuses on helping businesses drive user retention, engagement, and growth through personalized messaging. It offers a suite of tools for email marketing, push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, and web push. The platform’s analytics and reporting tools also provide deep insights into campaign performance, user engagement, and segmentation. 

Learn more: 7 Best MoEngage alternatives for marketing teams.

Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud is a comprehensive suite of marketing, advertising, analytics, and commerce solutions aimed at delivering personalized customer experiences across channels. It combines tools for digital advertising, content management, customer journey analytics, and personalization, allowing businesses to optimize their marketing efforts from start to finish. Some of the most popular tools include Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Experience Manager.

Learn more: 8 Adobe Experience Cloud alternatives for marketing teams.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a collection of enterprise-grade tools designed to help businesses create and manage personalized customer journeys across various channels, including email, social media, SMS, and web. It also supports other use cases like data unification, loyalty marketing, and marketing analytics. It’s one of the most versatile omnichannel solutions available but it also comes with a steep learning curve and price tag that’s typically more expensive than other competing solutions.

Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives.

Email and SMS customer engagement platforms for smaller businesses

These final solutions are mostly focused on helping small to mid-sized businesses automate emails and SMS messages, keep track of important customer conversations, and segment audiences for better targeting.

While they’re not as versatile as Acoustic when it comes to omnichannel customer engagement, they still offer customizable templates, drag-and-drop editors, and other features that help smaller teams easily create powerful campaigns. 

They also offer transparent and affordable plans, which makes it possible to get started quickly, without contacting sales or support teams. 

Keap

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is a marketing automation and CRM platform designed for small to mid-sized businesses. It offers a suite of tools that help businesses manage leads, sales, and customer relationships while automating marketing tasks such as email and text message campaigns, follow-ups, and reminders. Plus, its CRM system allows businesses to track customer interactions and get a 360-degree view of leads and clients. Keap’s pricing starts at $260/month for two user seats and 1500 contacts. 

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing automation platforms for small businesses owned by Intuit. It offers an easy-to-use interface for creating and managing email campaigns, automating workflows, and analyzing performance. It also has more advanced features for customer segmentation, behavioral targeting, predictive analytics, and landing page creation. Its paid plans start at $50/month for 500 email contacts.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing platform that helps businesses create, send, and track email campaigns. It simplifies the email marketing process with customizable templates, drag-and-drop email builders, and easy-to-use list management features. The platform also offers additional features like event marketing, SMS, social media ads, and integrations with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, as well as special pricing for nonprofit organizations. Constant Contact offers three pricing plans starting at $12/month.

Take your B2C marketing to the next level with Insider

Insider is the best Acoustic alternative for scaling mid-sized businesses and enterprise brands looking to maximize their marketing spend and efforts. Our platform offers access to a broader range of channels, lets you partner with best-in-class customer success teams, and ensures you can personalize every touchpoint in your customers’ journeys.

In a nutshell, our enterprise marketing platform can help you:

• Unify all customer data in one place so you can overcome data silos and get a clear view of each customer’s journey.
• Coordinate and personalize every customer touchpoint — from your website and mobile app to channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp push notifications, online ads, and more.
• Improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, retention, and acquisition costs by delivering relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations to the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right times.
• Predict behaviors with our AI-powered intent engine, like how much different segments are projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or engage on a specific channel.
• Use Generative and Conversational AI to quickly create campaign segments, copy, and images and have two-way conversations that market, sell, and support users on their favorite channels.

Lastly, our global customer support teams and library of proven templates ensure you can deploy our platform and start launching high-converting campaigns as fast as possible.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.