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

Cross-channel marketing and engagement platforms  

These platforms help you reach customers with personalized campaigns at every stage of their journey with your brand. They do this by:

• Aggregating your customer data in one place.
• Supporting many channels natively, including email, SMS, web push, and WhatsApp.
• Using automation and AI to ensure your campaigns contain the right messages and are sent to the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right times.

Note: If you haven’t worked with these types of platforms yet, we highly recommend checking out our guide to cross-channel marketing.

1. Insider

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

Note: Click here to see how Insider compares to Iterable in terms of setup, key features, ease of use, and customer reviews.

Over 1200 brands, including AVON, Samsung, and CNN use Insider to aggregate their customer data, automate cross-channel marketing campaigns, and improve key metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates (CTR), acquisition costs (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and more.

For example:

• AVON used Insider’s AI-powered product recommendations to increase AOV and CTR by 11% and 13%, respectively.
• Lexus used Insider to show engaging, personalized stories to mobile users, resulting in a 104.88% increase in leads.
• Rivièra Maison used Insider’s advanced on-site personalization suite to achieve a 7.38% conversion rate uplift and a 17.08% boost in AOV. 

Overall, Insider has been ranked at the top of categories like personalization, mobile marketing, and cross-channel campaign management by Forrester, Gartner, and G2:

In the next sections, we’ll discuss how Insider can help you replace all of Iterable’s core functionality and expand to additional channels and use cases.

Unify your customer data and create highly targeted customer segments

The first step to creating successful marketing strategies is bringing your customer data together, so you can:

• Get a clear understanding of your customers’ behaviors and interests.
• Track their interactions and purchase histories.
• Find their preferred touchpoints.

We know this is a big challenge for companies whose data is scattered across customer relationship management systems (CRMs), analytics tools, content management systems (CMSs), and other software solutions.

That’s why we’ve made it as easy as possible to unify your data with Insider. 

Our platform can bring together data from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, websites, mobile apps, analytics platforms, APIs, point-of-sale devices, and much more. Our team also helps you set up Insider (with no extra setup charge) and gives you ideas for trying new tactics and campaigns based on your current analytics data.

After your data is aggregated, Insider automatically creates 360-degree profiles containing crucial insights into your customers’:

• Purchase history.
• Channel reachability.
• Last visited products.
• Most visited product categories.
• And other key areas shown below.

Insider even creates such profiles for anonymous visitors who haven’t shared any contact data with you. This lets you personalize the on-site experience of anonymous visitors and send them relevant web push notifications—a fast and inexpensive way to turn leads into customers.

Alongside these unified customer profiles, Insider automatically creates various audiences which you can use to easily segment your user base.

For example, our predictive audiences let you target users based on their:

• Discount affinity.
• Interest clusters.
• Potential spending.
• Customer lifecycle status.
• Likelihood to purchase or churn.

There are also predefined audiences of users who abandoned their carts, interacted with your company on a specific channel, made a purchase within a specific time period, and many more shown below.

These can be further enriched with tons of standard user characteristics, allowing you to create highly targeted segments for your campaigns. Examples include:

• Leads from the U.K. with a high discount affinity who have abandoned their carts and have interacted with your brand via email.
• Anonymous visitors from the U.S. who have a high likelihood to purchase and are interested in a specific product category.
• Customers who use an iOS device, have a high likelihood of churning, and just signed into your mobile app.

Note: You can check out more examples in our detailed guide to marketing segmentation.

Reach customers on the right channels, at the right time, with the right content

As we said, Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities and channels. This means you can use our platform to reach leads and customers on any touchpoint, including:

• Email. Insider makes it easy to create personalized email marketing campaigns and trigger them based on each customer’s real-time behavior. Plus, our AI-powered algorithms automatically update the content and product recommendations in each email based on users’ most recent behavior before opening the email. Note: We cover this topic in detail in our article on the best email marketing platforms.

• SMS. Like email, SMS is among the most popular digital marketing channels today. Insider lets you easily create personalized SMS messages with dynamic content and schedule them for each user’s timezone. Note: For an in-depth look into this topic, check out our article on the best email and SMSmarketing tools (featuring tools like Mailchimp, Omnisend, and Klaviyo).

• WhatsApp. Insider is a Meta-verified Business Solution Provider, so our team can help create a WhatsApp Business profile, set up the platform, and start running successful WhatsApp campaigns. We can even help you implement conversational commerce and provide customers with an end-to-end buying experience in WhatsApp. Note: We cover this topic in detail in our article on the top WhatsApp marketing tools.

• Facebook Messenger. Like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger is a widely popular messaging channel used by over a billion people. With Insider, you can use Facebook Messenger to send personalized messages in response to transactions, events, and other user actions. 

• Web push notifications. Web push notifications help you bring back customers to your site at no additional cost, which is a massive advantage over traditional channels like email and SMS. With Insider, each web push notification is personalized, ensuring high relevance, engagement, and conversion rates.

• App push notifications. If you have a mobile app, app push notifications are a must in your mobile marketing repertoire. Insider offers lots of different one-off and automated app push notifications, including carousels, sliders, and discovery notifications.

• Social media ads. When you use Insider’s segmentation, you can export your audiences and target them with personalized ads on Google Search, Facebook, and TikTok. For example, you can target users with a high likelihood to purchase by showing them an ad for the items they recently browsed on your site. 

Lastly, Insider also has a huge template library for each channel and tons of different use cases. These help you get campaigns up and running in no time using a simple drag-and-drop editor.

For example, you can use our Wheel of Fortune or Scratch Coupon templates to generate more leads by gamifying your users’ experience. In fact, Yves Rocher used Wheel of Fortune to increase their lead database by 6% in 30 days.

Personalize every element of your site to each customer’s interests, behaviors, and preferences 

Engaging customers on their preferred channels is an essential part of successful cross-channel marketing.

However, if you want to make the most out of your marketing budget, you also have to personalize every element of your website or mobile app to each customer’s interests, behaviors, and preferences. That way, you ensure the entire journey is engaging and individualized, which results in higher conversion rates.

Insider helps you do that by customizing every element users see, including:

• Product recommendations. Our AI-powered Smart Product Recommender helps you improve product discovery by highlighting trending products, recently viewed items, location-based bestsellers, and other item combinations. Note: Chow Sang Sang used this capability to achieve a 10.5% uplift in conversion rate on their site.

• Search results. Users often make between three to five searches before abandoning your site. EUREKA—our AI-powered tool for AI- personalized search results—lets you provide each searcher with highly relevant results based on their past actions, purchase history, and predicted behaviors.

• Categories. Our Category Optimizer lets you shuffle how categories are presented to each user to ensure easier navigation and higher relevance. Note:Samsung used this tool to achieve a 10% conversion rate uplift during the launch campaigns for their Galaxy Note 9.

• Stories. InStory—our product for adding Instagram-like stories to your mobile site or app—is a powerful way to catch mobile users’ attention and turn them into subscribers and paying customers. These stories are dynamically updated by our algorithms to show relevant content and product recommendations to each user who clicks on them. Note: Garanti BBVA used InStory and found that the number of credit card applications (their key conversion) was 4x higher for users who saw a story compared to a control group.

• Banners, sliders, pop-ups, and all other content. Our team can help you come up with ideas for engaging website visitors through all sorts of personalized content depending on your goals (higher conversions, time on page, CTR, etc.). Note: CNN used Insider’s personalization and A/B testing capabilities to compare different types of sliders, resulting in a 5.81% increase in CTR.

Build, automate, and analyze cross-channel marketing campaigns

So far, we’ve mostly discussed how Insider helps you personalize individual touchpoints in a customer’s journey. But for your customers, these touchpoints don’t exist in a vacuum—they’re part of an entire experience, so they need to work in unison and adapt in real-time.

This is where Architect—our journey builder tool—comes in.

Architect lets you create, personalize, and automate multi-step customer journeys. For example, you can build a journey for users who saw one of your ads by instructing Insider to follow up the ad with a push notification and an email the next day.

This is done through an intuitive drag-and-drop editor which lets you trigger journeys based on:

• Events, like users visiting a product category, abandoning their carts, or making a repeat purchase.
• Restockings of popular items.
• Price drops, and much more.

You can also decide how these journeys unfold—e.g., which channels are used to reach users, how long Insider waits before contacting them, and so on.

However, you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Like the rest of our platform, Architect is also powered by AI, which can simplify your workflow and help you get the best results by:

• Automatically selecting the next best channel to continue a journey.
• Optimizing send times to ensure customers receive your messages when they’re most likely to open them.

You can even A/B test different paths in your journeys to see which one brings in better results. For example, you can test whether using SMS, email, or web push notifications causes more cart abandoners to return and finish their purchases.

AI does a lot of the work for you here as well. Instead of you having to analyze the results of your A/B tests manually, our Winner Autoselection feature can do that and automatically optimize the customer journey based on a metric you selected in advance (e.g., deliverability, open rates, conversion rates, or revenue). 

We’ve explored Architect and its automation capabilities in detail in other articles, so if you’re interested, check out:

• How to use omnichannel marketing automation (with examples).
• 8 proven eCommerce marketing automation strategies and tools. 

Finally, since Insider is a very versatile tool, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into delivering an easy setup and management experience—from the setup assistance provided by our team to the huge template library which we update all the time.

As a result, customers continuously rank Insider as a top performer in categories like ease of use, quality of support, and ease of setup. 

If you want to learn more about Insider and how it can benefit your business specifically, book a free live demo with our team.

2. Braze

Braze is a cross-channel customer engagement platform. It supports channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. It also has built-in data aggregation, campaign orchestration, and in-app messaging capabilities.

Note: You can click here to see how Braze compares to Insider.

Suggested reading: 12 Braze Competitors and Alternatives for Cross-Channel Marketing 

3. Ortto

Ortto is a marketing automation software that helps companies aggregate their customer data and build detailed segments. It also has a host of features for engaging and communicating with users, including email marketing, push notifications, live chat, pop-ups, forms, and surveys.

Note: You can click here to see how Ortto compares to Insider.

4. Blueshift

Blueshift is an AI-powered cross-channel marketing platform. It has features for campaign automation, creating dynamic customer profiles, and creating personalized experiences at scale. Blueshift also helps brands improve their paid and direct media efforts through segmentation and automation.

Note: You can click here to see how Blueshift compares to Insider.

5. CleverTap

CleverTap is an all-in-one customer engagement platform that’s heavily focused on mobile experiences. It supports channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. In 2022, CleverTap acquired Leanplum—another popular player in the mobile app engagement world. 

Note: You can click here to see how CleverTap compares to Insider.

6. MoEngage

MoEngage is an insights-led customer engagement platform. According to their website, MoEngage lets brands harness the power of personalization across different touchpoints. Overall, MoEngage supports marketing channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. 

Note: You can click here to see how MoEngage compares to Insider.

7. Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud combines a few of Adobe’s marketing and engagement products, like:

• Marketo Engage, which helps with B2B and B2C marketing automation.
• Adobe Target, which is a personalization engine and A/B testing software.
• Adobe Experience Manager, which is a content and digital asset management system.
• Adobe Campaign, which gives brands a single place to manage and automate marketing campaigns.

Note: Click here to see how Marketo Engage compares to Insider and here for a comparison to Adobe Target.

Solutions for niche use cases

The tools below can replace some of Iterable’s features – mainly data aggregation, email, and SMS. They’re a good choice for small teams who: 

• Need a part of Iterable’s marketing channels and automation functionality, as opposed to a complete Iterable alternative.
• Want a tool that supports different use cases, like building landing pages or automating sales interactions.

8. Klaviyo

While it started as an email marketing solution, Klaviyo is developing into a complete cloud-based marketing automation platform. It supports email, SMS, and mobile app push notifications. It also helps brands target the right audience through advanced segmentation and behavior-based automation.

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

9. Moosend

Moosend is a marketing automation platform for:

• Managing email lists.
• Sending personalized email campaigns.
• Building landing pages and subscription forms.
• Tracking and reporting on your marketing campaigns.

While it’s perhaps the simplest tool on this list, it can be integrated with other SaaS solutions for more advanced functionality, like Intercom (for live chat), Salesforce (for a complete CRM), or HubSpot’s Marketing Hub (for SEO).

10. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, automation, and CRM platform. It helps brands create and automate email campaigns, build landing pages, and track visitors’ on-site behaviors. It also has features for sales engagement, sales automation, and lead scoring. 

Like Moosend, ActiveCampaign has integrations with other tools that can extend its functionality, like SlickText (for SMS), Segment (for CDP functionality), and Google Analytics (for attribution tracking).

Boost your conversions, revenue, and retention with Insider

Insider can help you replace all of Iterable’s core capabilities, while also giving you access to more messaging channels, advanced on-site personalization, and other features for improving your conversions, revenue, and retention.

You can use Insider to:

• Aggregate your customer data—from CRMs, CMSs, analytics tools, or any other online or offline sources—into one place.
• Track customers’ behaviors and uncover their interests and preferred touchpoints.
• Use our AI-powered intent engine to predict future behaviors (e.g., churn or purchase likelihood).
• Create individualized shopping experiences across all customer touchpoints—including your website and mobile app, as well as channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.

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