Edwin Halim
Apr 7, 2023
Edwin Halim
Apr 7, 2023
Braze is one of the most popular customer engagement and personalization platforms.
Many brands use it to reach their customers on different touchpoints (like email and SMS), build multichannel campaigns, and automate their engagement efforts.
In the process, some companies run into limitations that prompt them to look for a Braze alternative. For example, some teams need more robust on-site personalization features to boost conversion rates by tailoring all website elements — like banners, categories, search results, and product recommendations — to every user’s preferences.
That’s why in this article, we’ve compiled the 11 best Braze competitors and alternatives, including:
Insider
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Oracle Marketing
Iterable
WebEngage
CleverTap
Dynamic Yield
OneSignal
Attentive
Klaviyo
Personalize Every Customer Touchpoint with Insider
The first seven solutions have many or all of Braze’s capabilities and supported channels. You can use them as complete alternatives to Braze, without needing third-party integrations for most use cases. Some of them also have more robust website personalization features.
The final four options are mainly focused on specific platforms (e.g., mobile apps) or channels (e.g., email and SMS). They can be good alternatives to Braze for more niche use cases, although you’ll need integrations to run marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
Insider unifies your customer data and helps you personalize every touchpoint customers have with your brand — from your website and mobile app to channels like SMS, email, WhatsApp, and web push. To learn more, visit our website or schedule a demo with our team.
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as channels like email, SMS, web push, and WhatsApp.
Over 1200 brands including Toyota, Lenovo, and Puma use Insider to:
In short, Insider helps you unify fragmented data and create high-performing, cross-channel marketing campaigns — all in one place.
That’s why our platform has been ranked at the top of categories like cross-channel campaign management, personalization, and mobile marketing by Forrester, Gartner, and G2:
In the next sections, we’ll show you three ways to simplify your workflow and improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, and acquisition costs (CAC) with Insider.
When you first start using Insider, our team will help you aggregate all your customer data into our platform, like:
Thanks to this capability, you get unified, 360-degree profiles of all customers filled with valuable information about their purchase history, channel reachability, last visited and abandoned products, and much more.
Additionally, Insider also creates profiles for all anonymous visitors who land on your site or mobile app. As visitors navigate your product, our platform automatically enriches their profiles with data about:
As a result, you have behavioral data even before visitors have shared any contact information with you. For example, the screenshot below shows a profile for an anonymous visitor.
There’s lots of useful information you can use to understand and convert these anonymous visitors, like their:
You can also click on “Events” to get an in-depth look at everything they’ve done on your site or app.
Put simply, Insider brings together all the data you need to create a personalized experience for every visitor and customer.
Many of our clients consider our Actionable CDP as the foundation for their cross-channel marketing efforts:
“At the forefront of this is Insider’s amazing Customer Data Platform (CDP) as that’s the product that knits everything together. Their CDP helps us integrate data from a variety of sources together to act on it to create engaging cross-channel campaigns. We are able to understand our customers better since the data aren’t siloed now but are in a single, centralized location.”
Note: You can dive deeper into this topic in our guide to the 7 top CDPs in 2023.
Insider can personalize every element of your website or mobile app to each visitor and customer in real-time.
This ability can massively increase conversion rates, which is crucial for marketing teams who want to make the most of their budget and turn visitors into paying customers faster.
Here are some examples of website and mobile app elements you can personalize with Insider:
However, even after a personalized experience, many first-time visitors still won’t buy a product right away.
That’s why Insider also helps you bring users back to your site with personalized web push notifications. This is essential for companies trying to maximize their digital marketing budget as it avoids retargeting customers with expensive social media and search ads.
For example, say you have a segment of first-time visitors who are browsing your online store without buying anything. You’ve likely spent a sizable chunk of your budget to attract them to your site, so it’s crucial to bring them back and turn them into customers.
Companies typically use retargeting ads for that purpose. But while effective, these ads are expensive, which increases CAC and eats into profit margins.
This is where web push notifications come in. You just need to show a push consent pop-up to visitors (we have lots of templates to make this easier), so they can agree to receive notifications.
This doesn’t require any personal data on their end, like names, emails, or phone numbers. Once they agree, you can send them web push notifications that are personalized based on the products, price ranges, and attributes they showed interest in.
And again, after visitors come back to your site, the experience will be tailored to their behaviors and interests, including the banners, messaging, and product recommendations.
This capability can be incredibly useful for improving AOV, lowering CAC, and reducing cart abandonments. For example:
The ability to target and convert anonymous visitors is powerful, but it’s only one part of Insider’s versatile toolkit.
When you have users’ contact information, you can easily scale your personalization efforts across channels and build high-converting, automated campaigns.
This process typically starts with segmenting your target audience.
For example, you can build segments based on users’ devices and operating systems, (e.g., iOS or Android), their purchasing and browsing behavior, their email engagement, and much more.
Additionally, our AI-powered predictive algorithms automatically create different audiences based on users’ likelihood to purchase or churn, their discount affinity, and potential LTV, as shown below.
You can combine these standard and predictive audiences to build highly-targeted segments for your campaigns. For example, you can build a segment of users who:
With your segments in place, you can create individualized, cross-channel journeys using Insider’s Architect.
Architect is our journey builder for creating complex growth marketing campaigns via a simple drag-and-drop editor. These campaigns can be triggered by:
Price drops, and more.
From here, you’re in full control of how the journey unfolds. For example, you can start by engaging a certain segment with web push notifications and move on to email and SMS as a backup. Or, you can A/B test different messages and channels against each other to see which ones bring the most conversions and revenue.
If you’re not sure which touchpoint to try, Insider’s next-best channel predictions can help. This AI-powered feature automatically decides which channels to try next based on each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.
For example, say you want to run an upsell campaign for customers who bought something from you two weeks ago.
You can start by sending a confirmation email to all customers who made a successful purchase. Then, you can have Insider wait for two weeks and send those same customers recommendations for products that are frequently purchased together with the ones they bought.
If you don’t know which channel to try, just select the “Next Best Channel” option to determine which one brings in the most sales. You can include all your channels or limit which ones Insider can choose from — e.g., compare only email and SMS, or include other options like web push and WhatsApp.
MAC Cosmetics was one of the companies that used Architect to create unique journeys for different customer segments. For instance, they built a cross-channel journey for users who abandoned their carts. They used web push and personalized on-site product recommendations to target the right people, with the right message, at the right time.
This campaign had a 14.45% clickthrough rate (CTR) and a 16.69% conversion rate across channels.
Finally, you can easily analyze the results of your campaigns right in the journey builder (as shown above) or in the dedicated analytics section of our platform.
For more automation strategies and examples, check out our articles on:
Aggregating customer data and building effective cross-channel campaigns can be difficult and time-consuming. That’s why we’ve invested a lot of effort and resources into making the process as easy as possible for all Insider customers.
First, our experienced support team helps you implement Insider (with no extra setup charge).
Our experts ensure you’re collecting the data you need to create personalized experiences for visitors and customers. They also analyze your site and analytics to give you relevant ideas for building campaigns, setting up automations, and trying different personalization strategies.
In fact, customers often mention our support team as one of the biggest benefits of working with Insider:
“Additionally, the support team at Insider impressed us greatly with their combination of extensive global experience and local market knowledge. We highly recommend Insider to any company seeking to enhance its channels.“
As a result, we’re consistently ranked as a top performer in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support.
Second, we offer a wide selection of customizable templates for all our channels and use cases.
You choose templates based on your goals — like increasing leads, conversions, engagement, app downloads, and so on — and easily customize them with your brand’s logo, colors, and messaging.
To learn more about Insider’s capabilities and how they can help you boost conversions, increase AOV and LTV, and reduce CAC, book a live demo with our team.
Adobe Marketing Cloud is a platform for creating, automating, and personalizing cross-channel campaigns. It combines various products, like:
Note: Click here to see how Marketo Engage compares to Insider and here for a comparison to Adobe Target.
Similar to the previous entry, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an enterprise cloud platform that combines different solutions. Its foundation is Salesforce’s CDP which acts as a single source of truth for customer data. The cloud also includes a product for personalizing customer experiences and a marketing automation software tool for email, SMS, social media, and other channels.
Note: Click here to see how Salesforce Marketing Cloud compares to Insider.
Oracle Marketing is a cloud-based marketing platform comprising various martech solutions. Most of the platform is made up of products acquired by Oracle over the years, like Eloqua (for marketing automation) and Maxymiser (for testing and optimization). The entire product set helps companies unify customer data, deliver personalized experiences, and increase customer loyalty and retention.
Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform for email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app personalization. Its’ foundation is a centralized data platform that aggregates various types of information — including customer, product, and business data — and helps businesses remove data silos. It also has a tool for designing personalized customer journeys for customers at scale.
Note: Click here to see how Iterable compares to Insider.
Learn more: 10 Best Iterable competitors and alternatives in 2023 (in-depth look).
WebEngage is a retention and customer engagement platform that combines a CDP, a personalization engine, an omnichannel campaign tool, and an analytics solution. It supports both on-site and in-app personalization, as well as channels like email, SMS, and web push. It can also help with Facebook and Google retargeting by exporting user segments and using them for more precise targeting.
Note: Click here to see how WebEngage compares to Insider.
CleverTap is an omnichannel user engagement platform. While its main focus has always been on mobile apps, it also supports external channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp. CleverTap excels in industries like gaming, food tech, and SaaS with specialized features for customer lifecycle management and optimization. Lastly, in 2022 CleverTap acquired Leanplum — another popular user engagement startup focused on mobile apps.
Note: Click here to see how CleverTap compares to Insider.
Dynamic Yield is a personalization platform for websites, mobile apps, and email marketing. It lets brands combine customer data from various sources, build detailed segments, and target them with personalized campaigns. It also has a product recommendation engine that helps determine what customers are likely to buy next. Lastly, Dynamic Yield supports integrations for many popular marketing tools like FullStory, Twilio’s SendGrid, and TypeForm.
Note: Click here to see how Dynamic Yield compares to Insider.
OneSignal is a customer engagement solution focused on push notifications, email, SMS, and in-app messaging. Companies use it to reach customers on these channels with personalized content, A/B test their engagement strategies, and analyze customer behavior. OneSignal also has a journey builder that simplifies multichannel marketing campaign orchestration.
Note: Click here to see how OneSignal compares to Insider.
Attentive is a versatile SMS marketing platform. It lets brands increase their SMS subscriber growth through different sign-up units that can be quickly designed and deployed on a website, mobile app, or messaging channel. It also offers various SMS campaign automation and personalization features.
Klaviyo is an eCommerce marketing automation platform for small businesses, as well as midsize and enterprise companies. The platform is focused on email and SMS and it helps companies expand their subscriber lists, create detailed segments based on behaviors, interests, LTV, and more. It also comes with lots of email and SMS templates, as well as pre-built automations for various use cases.
Note: Click here to see how Klaviyo compares to Insider
Learn more: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types.
Insider can help you create individualized, cross-channel campaigns across all touchpoints users have with your brand — from your website and mobile app to web push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
Our enterprise marketing platform can also:
Our experienced support team will help you set up Insider, so you can start collecting valuable data and building personalized experiences that drive conversions and revenue as fast as possible.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Written by
Edwin Halim
Edwin is oversees Insider's customer success team in Indonesia and the Philippines. He has 6+ years of experience in digital marketing, with a special focus on multichannel CRM strategy, growth hacking, and A/B testing. Before Insider, Edwin was a technology consultant at Accenture and co-founded his own Digital Agency.
