Christopher Lowe
Mar 10, 2023
Christopher Lowe
Mar 10, 2023
Personalization software lets you tailor messaging, content, and product recommendations to each user’s behaviors and interests. This helps you make the most out of your marketing spend by increasing conversions, boosting average order value (AOV), and reducing acquisition costs (CAC).
However, personalization is a complex process that combines different activities across various marketing channels. As a result, there are tons of tools and platforms that specialize in different types of personalization.
Comparing them can be difficult, so in this article we’ve gathered the 15 best personalization software tools and organized them into three categories, depending on their area of specialization:
Insider can connect all your customer data and personalize every touchpoint along the user journey — from your website and mobile app to messaging channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.
Finally, we’ll also discuss three frequently asked questions about the types of data CDPs can ingest and the differences between CDPs and other similar platforms.
Insider can aggregate all your customer data from online and offline sources in one place and use that data to drive affinity-and-intent-informed, personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more about our platform.
Insider
DynamicYield
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Personyze
Iterable
VWO
Proof
Unbounce
Instapage
Acquia
Klaviyo
Moosend
Omnisend
Mailchimp
Drip
Personalize Every Customer Touchpoint with Insider
These platforms offer extensive personalization and automation features for websites and mobile apps, as well as for messaging channels like email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
This versatility helps companies make the most out of their personalization efforts by personalizing the entire customer journey, not just one or two touchpoints in it.
They’re also great for businesses looking to simplify marketing their stacks because they don’t require the use of separate software for website personalization, email marketing, SMS, and so on.
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for established channels like on-site and email, as well as emerging ones like WhatsApp, RCS, Facebook Messenger, and SMS.
Insider’s broad channel support and personalization capabilities help you save time, effort, and resources by consolidating your marketing stack and simplifying your workflow (compared to using lots of disconnected tools with different credentials and UIs).
Over 1200 brands rely on Insider to personalize their customers’ experiences and increase conversions, revenue, LTV, and AOV. For example:
Insider is also ranked as a leading personalization engine in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, as well as the best and easiest-to-use personalization software by G2.
In the next sections, you’ll learn how Insider can help you:
Successful personalization relies on data about your visitors and customers.
What pages they visit, what content they interact with, what products they browse, their purchase history, their interactions with your sales team and marketing messages — all of this info is the key to your personalization efforts.
But for most brands, this data is scattered in disconnected systems, e.g., an email marketing tool (like Klaviyo), a CRM (like Salesforce), a customer service platform (like Zendesk), and so on. As a result, crucial data becomes siloed off. This prevents companies from getting a good understanding of their customers without pouring tons of resources and engineering hours into complex integrations.
Insider’s Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps you avoid this problem by aggregating all your customer data in one central database.
Our CDP can combine data from any online or offline sources — like analytics tools, customer service software, CRMs, survey platforms, and point-of-service (POS) devices.
Insider also creates unified, 360-degree profiles of all customers, as shown below.
These profiles contain the essential ingredient for successful personalization — unified data about your customers (name, email, phone number, etc.), their behaviors and interests (last visited, purchased, and abandoned products), their interactions with your brand on each marketing channel (email, SMS, WhatsApp, etc.), and 100+ other attributes.
Our team helps you get this data from any system you’re using and consolidate it into Insider (without charging a separate setup fee). We also analyze your data and give you ideas for creating and optimizing your personalization strategy immediately after the setup.
Due to our focus on convenience, customers consistently rate us as a top performer in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support.
Here’s what one of our customers had to say about our support team:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“We met with a lot of different companies before working with Insider, but no support team came close. Insider’s support team is attentive, has global experience and also local expertise, which is exactly what we needed. In addition to this, the technology is easy to use and integrate, and meets all of our needs. We can say that Insider won our heart as the best platform with the most amazing team.
— Marketing manager and Insider partner, read the full review on G2.
Segmentation ensures you’re focusing your personalization efforts on the right people, which has a massive impact on your conversions and as a result — on your marketing ROI.
With Insider, you can segment your audience based on various factors like:
However, you’re not limited to creating manual segments with these attributes, as Insider also creates predictive and predefined audiences for you.
For example, our predictive AI-powered algorithms let you target users based on their:
In fact, this predictive segmentation is an essential capability for many of our customers:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Insider’s AI-driven predictive segmentation is spot on, customizable in terms of granularity and focus, and this is what we liked best about Insider.”
— Digital marketing manager and Insider partner, read the full review on G2.
Insider also creates predefined audiences of users who:
These automatically-created audiences save you lots of time and effort because you can target them directly or use them to make your segments even more precise.
Here are some example segments you can create by combining our pre-made audiences with manual segmentation:
Put simply, our versatile segmentation lets you narrow down your audience and serve content, messaging, and product recommendations to the right people at the right times.
For example, Forum Sport (a retailer with over 50 stores in Europe) used Insider’s segmentation to divide users into two categories — those with more than €150 in the cart and those who had less than €150 worth of items in their cart. By engaging these segments with personalized messaging and social proof, Forum Sport saw:
With your data and segments in place, you can start creating personalized experiences for all your customers (this process is called “data activation”).
Insider’s extensive channel support and versatile personalization features allow you to personalize every touchpoint along the customer journey, like:
Additionally, Insider’s Architect lets you orchestrate personalized customer journeys across all touchpoints and automate your marketing campaigns.
Architect is our tool for building cross-channel journeys using a simple drag-and-drop editor. For example, the screenshot below shows a journey that’s triggered when a customer opens an email.
After that, Insider waits for 30 minutes and uses its next-best channel predictions to determine what touchpoint to try next — in this case, SMS, email, app push, and web push.
You can also compare the performance of two or more variations of a journey with our A/B Split Testing features.
The screenshot above shows a test that separates customers into four categories and uses different journeys for engaging them — one starting with web push, another with app push, a third one waits for a time slot, and the final one begins with an email.
So far, we’ve mostly discussed how to personalize the experience of people who’ve shared contact information with you (i.e., customers or subscribers).
But what about anonymous visitors?
Anonymous visitors make up the vast majority of traffic for most websites. Turning them into paying customers can be very expensive, as they often have to be nurtured for weeks with search and social media ads, which eats into companies’ profit margins.
Insider helps you overcome this problem by:
Here’s how:
When unknown visitors land on your site, Insider creates a profile for them in your Unified Customer Database.
This profile is automatically populated with information about their behaviors and interests (e.g., the pages they visit, the products they browsed, the price ranges they’re looking at, etc.). As a result, you have valuable personalization data before visitors have bought anything or shared personal information with you.
This helps you personalize their experience while they’re browsing your site, which reduces the time it takes to turn them into paying customers and increases conversion rates.
However, many people still won’t purchase on their first visit, so it’s essential to have a way to bring them back to your site. Most businesses use retargeting ads for that purpose. However, the costs associated with this approach often result in the first few purchases being made at a loss for the company.
That’s why Insider supports push notifications that can bring back people to your site with personalized offers, without needing to spend money on expensive performance ads.
You only need to get visitors’ consent to send them notifications (which doesn’t require any personal data).
For example, Chemist Warehouse used this strategy to target users who abandoned a product page. Their push notifications were personalized with relevant feature details and photos of users’ last viewed product, leading to an 85% uplift in conversions.Finally, Insider can also help you gather unknown visitors’ contact information and grow your subscriber base with targeted pop-ups, gamified templates, and more.
To see Insider in action and learn how it can help you personalize your customers’ experience, book a live demo with our team.
DynamicYield is an experience optimization platform. Its’ foundation is called Experience OS — a single place for managing and analyzing personalization activities across channels like on-site, in-app, email, and push notifications. DynamicYield also offers a machine learning system (called AdaptML) that tailors different touchpoints to customer behaviors and purchase intent.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing platform for engaging with visitors and customers through their entire lifecycle. It combines different products, including a CDP, a CMS, an email marketing tool, and a mobile studio (for personalized SMS, chat, and push notifications). It also offers a journey builder that lets brands create and automate cross-channel customer journeys.
Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives
Personyze is an omnichannel marketing automation solution focused on websites, mobile apps, and email. It has features for:
Personyze also supports a host of integrations with popular tools, as well as server-side and client-side APIs.
Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform. It has features for centralizing customer data and activating it across email, SMS, social, and push notifications. Its Catalog product also helps brands build and automate cross-channel customer experiences and send messages to the right customers at the right times.
These tools help marketing teams personalize the experience of website visitors, build custom landing pages, add social proof, and A/B test content and offers to see which ones convert best
Since these tools aren’t built for messaging channels, they usually have to be integrated with third-party solutions (e.g., email and text marketing tools). This makes them a better choice for companies that mainly want to boost their websites’ conversions, as opposed to improving their results across all marketing channels.
VWO is a comprehensive experimentation and personalization platform for websites and mobile apps. It combines different tools for:
VWO also offers a CDP (called VWO Data360) that helps unify customer data and creates unified profiles of individual users.
Proof is a tool that helps companies improve their website conversion rates through social proof marketing. It lets marketers add various elements to their sites, like hot streaks (to show how popular certain actions are), live visitor counts (to induce scarcity), and recent activity displays (to boost visitors’ confidence). It also offers A/B testing features so companies can see the impact these changes have on conversions.
Unbounce is a landing page builder with lots of page templates and features for AI copywriting and AI traffic optimization. It can also be used to create pop-ups and sticky bars to present personalized offers, increase email subscriber bases, and experiment with new promos (including A/B testing).
Instapage combines a landing page builder with personalization and experimentation capabilities. It has a proprietary rendering engine that ensures web pages load as quickly as possible. Instapage also helps create landing pages with its AI Content product that can write headlines, paragraphs, and CTAs.
Acquia is a digital experience platform (DXP). It’s also a unique entry to this list as it’s the only software built for a specific platform — Drupal. Overall, Acquia’s products are organized into two solutions:
These tools specialize in the two most popular marketing channels, especially for eCommerce personalization — email and SMS. They can personalize content, messaging, and product recommendations on these channels, help grow subscriber bases, and automate marketing campaigns.
Some of them also have landing page builders and on-site personalization features, but their functionalities are limited compared to the tools in the previous categories. That’s why these final tools are typically used in combination with cross-channel personalization platforms or specialized website personalization tools.
Note: If you’re also interested in WhatsApp as a marketing channel, check out our article on the 8 best WhatsApp marketing tools and platforms.
Klaviyo is an eCommerce marketing automation platform. While it started as an email marketing solution, Klaviyo also added an SMS product to its offering. Today, the platform has various features for automating campaigns across email and SMS and for increasing subscriber bases with checkout consent, pop-ups, forms, and more.
Learn more: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors and alternatives for all business types
Moosend is an email marketing and automation software for small and mid-sized businesses that was acquired by Sitecore. It offers a suite of tools for email marketing, marketing automation, audience segmentation, and more. Moosend also has various reporting and analytics features for tracking the success of marketing campaigns, as well as an option for building custom reports.
Omnisend is an eCommerce automation platform for email marketing, SMS, and web push notifications. It also has products for building landing pages, creating lead capture pop-ups, and using gamification to increase subscriber bases. Lastly, Omnisend can send exit intent popups that help reduce bounce rates and increase email signups.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools for small businesses. Although the company was acquired by Intuit, Mailchimp continues to exist as a standalone product. Besides its standard email marketing features, Mailchimp also offers a journey builder and AI suggestions that help boost customer engagement.
Drip is an eCommerce marketing automation solution with a focus on email personalization, customer segmentation, and analytics. It has a drag-and-drop email builder that companies can use to send abandoned cart links, showcase store products, and add other email personalization elements. Drip also recently released a product for adding sidebars, sticky bars, quizzes, and other dynamic content to websites.
Insider can help you boost conversions, reduce CAC, and improve retention, AOV, and LTV by:
Finally, our easy channel integrations, experienced support team, and extensive template library will ensure you get up and running as fast as possible.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Personalization software enhances user experiences through data collection and analysis. It segments users based on shared traits, enabling tailored content delivery in real-time. By optimizing strategies and tracking interactions, businesses improve engagement and conversion rates. This software’s dynamic nature fosters ongoing enhancements to meet evolving user preferences. Alternatively, businesses can opt for custom software solutions tailored to their unique requirements
Email and SMS personalization tools allow businesses to send highly targeted and relevant messages to their subscribers. By personalizing content, timing, and offers, these tools can increase open rates, click-through rates, and overall customer engagement.
Segmentation involves categorizing a customer base into distinct groups based on specific criteria, such as demographics, behavior, or preferences. Businesses can use segmentation to tailor marketing messages and offers to each group’s unique needs, increasing the relevance of communication and improving conversion rates. Effective segmentation allows for more targeted and personalized marketing strategies.
Written by
Christopher Lowe
Christopher has a long history of driving value and creating personalized, omnichannel journeys that enhance customer experience. He's passionate about learning and development and has a keen interest in developing economies, especially ones with a lot of room for digital growth.
