9 Best Emarsys competitors and alternatives (detailed review)

We’re going to look at each tool’s key channels and use cases so you can get a good idea of which Emarsys capabilities it can replace and how it can potentially overcome some of Emarsys’ limitations.

Insider can help you create, personalize, and automate marketing campaigns across your website, mobile app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and other channels. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.

1. Insider

Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, web push, and WhatsApp.

Over 1200 brands, including Adidas, Lexus, and CNN, use Insider’s data aggregation, personalization, and automation tools to:

• Overcome data silos by consolidating their customer data into a single database to get a clear, 360-degree view of each customer.
• Home in on the right audiences for their campaigns with AI-powered segmentation. 
• Unify their marketing stack and work more efficiently by setting up, managing, and analyzing campaigns across any channel from a single place (as opposed to five or six separate tools).
• Lower acquisition costs and boost conversions, revenue, and retention by delivering the right content, messaging, and product recommendations on the right channels at the right times.
• Deliver personalized site search results, engaging Instagram-like stories, and much more.

Our platform has been ranked among the top personalization engines, customer data platforms (CDP), and mobile marketing software solutions by G2, IDC, and Gartner.

Note: You can click here to see how Insider stacks up to Emarsys based on customer reviews.

In the next sections, we’ll explore four key benefits of working with Insider to create high-converting, personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints.

#1 Fast time-to-value and return on investment (ROI): Flexible setup, experienced support team, and versatile templates

Emarsys’ setup and integration process is often difficult, especially for large eCommerce brands that have to upload their product catalogs as CSV files to the platforms. This limited option forces companies to put their data in a very specific format, which can take lots of time and effort.

In contrast, Insider gives you flexible setup and integration options. For example, eCommerce businesses can:

• Use Insider’s website tag to crawl through their site and create a product catalog. This is a great option if you want to get started fast, with minimal effort.
• Upload their product catalogs as CSV and XML files or even feed the data through an API. Companies that want more granular control over every piece of data in their catalog can use this more time-consuming option instead of the first one (or in addition to it).

Plus, our global and experienced support team ensures you see value from our platform as quickly as possible by:

• Helping you set up Insider (with no extra setup charge).
• Analyzing your website and analytics data before our first kick-off meeting. That way, they can give you ideas for implementing various marketing strategies that can generate quick conversions and revenue.
• Showing you how Insider’s key features work and how you can take advantage of them.

Our focus on making everything as simple as possible for customers has led to Insider being ranked as the easiest to use and easiest to admin solution in G2 categories like:

• CDPs.
• Personalization software.
• Mobile marketing software.

Customers also highlight our support team as a big reason for getting started and seeing value from Insider incredibly fast:

“Their customer support has been nothing but a delight to assist us in every step of the way. They’ve made the complete experience amazing!”

The final reason for Insider’s short time to value is our vast template library.

We offer templates for all Insider tools, channels, and use cases. For example, as you can see in the screenshot below, you can choose from various customer journey templates for:

• Generating leads.
• Increasing conversions.
• Gamifying customers’ shopping experience.
• And many more.

Or, you can browse templates by channel and use case. The screenshot below shows a few of our email templates for cart abandonment, browser abandonment, and email surveys.

Insider’s gamification templates are among the most widely used and effective ones in terms of generating leads, conversions, and revenue. 

For example, the Wheel of Fortune template lets visitors spin a wheel and potentially win a gift in exchange for their email or phone number. Clarins used this template to increase their lead capture by 45% by giving customers the chance to win free delivery, a discount on their next purchase, or a free sample.

Lastly, you can easily customize any template via a drag-and-drop editor and quickly add it to your site or app without needing developer assistance.

#2 Improved conversion rates and maximized marketing budgets: Advanced on-site and in-app personalization

Website personalization helps you increase your conversion rates, which is crucial for making the most out of the budget you’re spending to get users to your site.

However, many cross-channel marketing solutions offer either limited or very complex on-site personalization capabilities. They typically let you add basic pop-ups or banners but require developer work if you want to implement more advanced personalization strategies.

In contrast, Insider lets you easily tailor every element of your website or mobile app to each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferences.

For example, with Insider, you can personalize your website’s:

• Categories, like Samsung did for the launch campaign of their Galaxy Note 9. They used Insider’s Category Optimizer tool to automatically shuffle how categories were presented to each visitor, which led to a 10% conversion rate uplift.

• Banners, like Yves Rocher’s merchandising team did. Thanks to Insider’s Banner Management campaigns, they were able to personalize their numerous on-site banners for an 18.36% increase in conversion rates.

• Product recommendations, like AVON did to stand out in the competitive cosmetics and beauty space. They used Insider’s AI-powered Smart Recommender to deliver relevant product recommendations to each customer and to highlight trending and discounted products, leading to an 11% increase in average order value (AOV) and a 13% boost in clickthrough rates (CTR).

While many of our on-site personalization capabilities are powered by AI algorithms, you can also tweak and customize them based on your preferences. For example, if you’re using the Smart Recommender, you start by deciding which page on your site should display a certain personalized product recommendation.

Then, you can choose from different personalization strategies, like:

• User-based personalization, which is driven by our algorithms. It ensures the products shown to every user are based on their unique behaviors and preferences. 
• Most popular items, most-searched items, items that are often viewed or purchased together, and many other recommendation strategies shown below.

As a result, you can take full advantage of AI’s automation potential, while still retaining granular control over your site’s product recommendations.

Lastly, Insider also offers two unique products for website engagement and personalization:

• InStory. This tool lets you add Instagram-like stories to your site or app. These highly engaging stories contain personalized content, messaging, and product recommendations for every user that clicks on them. As we explained in our mobile marketing software guide, this makes them a fantastic tool for catching mobile users’ attention and putting mobile product discovery on autopilot.

• EUREKA. This tool lets you deliver personalized search results to every visitor who uses your site’s search function. You can also use it to help shoppers find what they’re looking for with advanced faceting filters based on attributes like price, category, brand, and more.

#3 High-converting, automated campaigns across all touchpoints: AI-powered customer journey builder

Besides personalizing your customers’ website and mobile app experiences, you can also tailor every other touchpoint they have with your brand. In fact, you can build fully personalized, cross-channel campaigns using Architect — our user-friendly customer journey orchestration tool. 

Here’s how the process works:

First, you start by choosing how each journey gets triggered. For example, journeys can be triggered by:

• Events, which can be any actions on your site or app, like users opening a page, adding items to their carts, completing a purchase, and so on.
• Attribute changes, which are user-level shifts, like loyal customers who stop making purchases over a period of time.
• Dynamic dates, which are great for periodically reminding users to get products that are purchased on a regular schedule.
• Price drops. 
• And much more.  

Then, you decide which visitor and customer segment should be included in the journey. Insider’s advanced segmentation helps you home in on the right audiences for each message or campaign.

You can use over 120+ attributes to create your segments, including traits, behaviors, preferences, and more. Or, you can start with our automatically built audiences of users who:

• Abandoned their cart (or a product page).
• Made a purchase over a specific period of time.
• Interacted with your brand on a channel like email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and so on.
• And others shown below.

Insider’s AI-powered algorithms help you make each segment even more precise. Our AI-generated predictive audiences let you target users based on their discount affinity, projected spending, likelihood of purchase or churn, customer lifecycle status, and much more.

Once you’ve built your segments (or selected one of your previously created ones), you use the drag-and-drop editor to control how each journey unfolds, i.e., what messages are sent on what channels and when each one gets triggered.

For example, the screenshot below shows a journey that’s triggered by an on-site event, then continues across email and SMS.

Thanks to Insider’s broad channel support, you can utilize lots of channels in the journey builder including:

• SMS.
• Email. 
• Push notifications. 
• WhatsApp. 
• Online ads. 
• Facebook Messenger.

While this versatility is great, it can be difficult to decide which channels to use and when to send each message. Fortunately, Insider’s AI-powered features can take care of this issue for you. Specifically:

• Send Time Optimization (STO) can analyze every recipient’s behavioral data and pick the ideal send time for sending each message.
• A/B Test Winner Autoselection. Insider has built-in A/B testing that you can use to compare different paths in a journey against each other. The Winner Autoselection feature helps you save time and effort by letting Insider automatically guide users to the winning patch in a journey based on deliverability, open rate, CTR, revenue, or any other winning metric you’ve selected.
• The next-best channel predictions can decide which touchpoint to try next, based on each user’s behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.

For a real-life example of Architect’s capabilities, you can check out our case study with Slazenger.

As an eCommerce brand, Slazenger was looking to improve their marketing ROI by engaging users on their preferred channels with contextual and relevant messaging.

They used Architect to:

• Recover lost revenue with personalized cart abandonment reminders. These timely and contextual reminders were sent to Slazenger’s customer base via web push, SMS, and email, leading to 40% of revenue being recovered in a single campaign.
• Entice potential shoppers to return with targeted price drop notifications. These were sent via email and web push to inform users whenever the price of a product they’d viewed, added to a wishlist, or abandoned in-cart dropped by 10% or more. These journeys had a 12.1% increase in CTR compared to their other campaigns.

Overall, Slazenger saw a 49x ROI in just eight weeks of working with Insider and experienced a 700% increase in customer acquisition thanks to our platform’s cross-channel personalization and automation capabilities.

#4 Data unification and 360-degree customer profiles: Insider’s Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP)

The foundation behind Insider’s ability to deliver highly personalized content, messaging, and product recommendations is our Actionable CDP.

The CDP is built to ingest information from any online or offline source — including customer relationship management systems (CRMs), content management systems (CMSs), APIs, popular SaaS tools, and other solution providers. As a result, brands use the CDP to:

• Consolidate their customer data and overcome data silos. This is a massive benefit for companies whose customer data is scattered across disconnected systems, preventing them from getting a clear view of the customer journey.
• Get accurate, 360-degree profiles of all customers. As you can see below, these profiles contain everything from customers’ names, emails, and phone numbers to their interactions with your brand on specific channels, on-site and in-app behaviors, and predictive characteristics, like their likelihood to purchase or churn.

Our CDP even creates profiles for anonymous website visitors with data about their website infractions — where they clicked, which product categories they browsed, what they added to their carts, and so on. 

Insider can use this data to personalize their experience in real-time (with relevant on-site content and web push notifications), which drastically lowers the time and resources required to turn new visitors into paying customers.

And once your data is aggregated into our CDP, you can start implementing data-backed strategies that have an immediate impact on your conversions and revenue. For example, you can:

• Personalize your site’s product recommendations based on users’ behavior in your mobile app (based on data from tools like Shopify and Salesforce Audience Studio).
• Notify visitors when there’s a drop in the price of an item they’re interested in (based on data from tools like Microsoft 365 and Magento).
• Offer discount coupons to customers with a low satisfaction score (based on data from tools like HubSpot and Zendesk).

You can also get a high-level overview of your audience to see:

• The number of known versus unknown users.
• The best digital marketing channels in terms of reachability.
• Other key metrics for your business, like funnel conversion rates, drop-offs, customer lifetime value, and more.

You can also easily drill down into specific channels and analyze their individual results. For example, the screenshot below shows an SMS analytics dashboard with key metrics like conversion rates, CTR, and revenue.

Finally, you can also analyze the results for your automated customer journeys in a dedicated dashboard. Insider gives you the option to see how your journeys are performing as a whole or analyze individual Architect campaigns to monitor how many users are moving between specific steps and uncover where most drop-offs occur.

Overall, Insider’s customizable analytics dashboards let you:

• Determine the ROI of each channel, campaign, or other marketing activity. 
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and adjust accordingly.
• Make data-driven decisions about how to distribute your budget across tactics and channels.

For more details on how Insider can help you build and automate personalized marketing campaigns across all touchpoints customers have with your brand, book a live demo with our team.

2. Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud (part of the larger Adobe Experience Cloud) is a suite of marketing tools for building, automating, and analyzing B2B and B2C cross-channel campaigns. Some of these tools include:

• Adobe Experience Manager, for creating, storing, and managing website content and other digital assets.
• Adobe Campaign, for unifying customer data and building email marketing campaigns.
• Marketo Engage, for automating workflows and managing leads.
• Adobe Target, for A/B testing and personalization. 

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Similar to other marketing hubs and clouds, Salesforce Marketing Cloud also brings together a suite of tools for:

• Personalization.
• Loyalty management.
• Account-based marketing.
• Customer data aggregation.
• Cross-channel automation and engagement.

It supports channels like email, social media, SMS, and push notifications. It also relies on AI to deliver relevant product recommendations and content across these channels.

4. Bloomreach

Bloomreach is an eCommerce experience platform. It offers three distinct products aimed at creating end-to-end commerce experiences:

1. Engagement, which covers channels and use cases like email, SMS, online ads, push notifications, web personalization, mobile app marketing, and A/B testing.
2. Discovery, which is a site search, SEO, and eCommerce merchandising solution.
3. Content, which is a headless CMS for building landing pages and managing websites.

Suggested reading: 11 Top Bloomreach competitors & alternatives (by category)

5. Braze

Braze is a cross-channel customer engagement platform. It supports channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications, with features for automating campaigns across them. It also has limited on-site personalization features, as well as a generative AI product (Sage AI) for building engaging cross-channel experiences.

Suggested reading: 12 Braze competitors & alternatives for cross-channel marketing

6. Iterable

Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform. It helps brands aggregate their customer data to get a clear view of their customers and overcome data silos. It also has features for building and automating campaigns across channels like email, SMS, and push notifications.

Suggested reading: 10 Best Iterable competitors and alternatives in 2023 (in-depth look)

7. SALESmanago

SALESmanago is a customer engagement platform for eCommerce marketing teams. It combines a CDP with various omnichannel automation and personalization capabilities. In terms of channels, SALESmanago supports email, SMS, push notifications, live chat, WhatsApp (via a third-party integration), and on-site.

8. MoEngage

MoEngage is an insights-led customer engagement platform for:

• SMS.
• Email.
• WhatsApp.
• Social media ads.
• Push notifications.
• In-app communications.

The platform also offers an AI-powered campaign builder and optimization tool, as well as website personalization capabilities for creating tailored user experiences.

9. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a cloud-based marketing automation platform primarily used by eCommerce businesses. 

Klaviyo started as an SMS and email marketing software tool for mid-sized and small businesses looking to send transactional messages and build simple SMS and email campaigns. But since then, Klaviyo has added features for larger companies and multi-channel use cases, like:

• Engaging users with mobile push notifications.
• Collecting and displaying customer reviews.
• Aggregating customer data.

Unlike traditional solutions in the email and automation space like (Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign), Klaviyo also offers an enterprise marketing automation software platform called Klaviyo One.

Suggested reading: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types

Take your cross-channel marketing to the next level with Insider

Insider is the ideal Emarsys alternative for midsize and enterprise companies looking for:

• A cross-channel marketing platform that supports tons of channels (like on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and push notifications) and offers versatile, hassle-free setup options.
• An experienced global support team that can guide you through the setup process and ensure you see immediate results from our platform.
• The ability to build, automate, and analyze campaigns across all channels from a single place.
• A vast library of proven templates for any channel or use case — from generating email, SMS, or WhatsApp subscribers with the help of gamification to automating cross-channel cart abandonment journeys or cross-sell campaigns.
• Advanced on-site and in-app personalization for tailoring content, messaging, and product recommendations to each user’s preferences.
• AI-powered segmentation and automations that reveal customers’ preferences and ensure every message is always sent to the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right times.

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