• by Ray Schultz , October 20, 2021

Twilio has launched a growth automation platform that it says can unify all customer data and deliver hyper-personalized marketing via all touchpoints, the firm announced on Wednesday at SIGNAL 2021.

The new tool, Twilio Engage, is now in pilot and will be generally available in Q1 2022. It is designed to “power personalized interactions across the entire customer journey,” says Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio Segment. 

Twilio Engage provides end-to-end customer engagement with customer data, messaging capabilities, and API extensibility, Reinhardt adds. 

The newest pillar in Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform (CEP), Twilio Engage leverages Twilio's Segment acquisition, and combines a CDP and a built-it-yourself solution. In addition to email and SMS, it offers over 400 integrations, Twilio says. 

Traditional marketing clouds lack the ability to collect customer data into one unified view, the firm asserts.

“In theory, existing marketing tools should empower brands to launch unique campaigns, but the truth is that they weren’t built to capture the billions of customer signals that exist today,” states Kathryn Murphy, GM of Twilio Engage. 

Murphy continues, “Teams of data scientists can help interpret these signals, but that is complex and time consuming—a costly ‘data tax’.

According to the company, Twilio Engage allows brands to:

Know their customers and accelerate campaign delivery

Personalize every interaction

Monitor every campaign in one place.

Some brands have tried the product in beta. 

“With Twilio Engage, we are able to collect, unify, and connect customer data in real time and build meaningful relationships at every touchpoint of the customer journey,” states Amit Shah, president at 1-800-Flowers.com.”We’re accelerating our digital business and data infrastructure by nearly a decade, and by doing so, delighting our customers.”

“With the launch of Twilio Engage, Twilio has introduced a new type of platform that has the potential to disrupt monolithic marketing suites and traditional multichannel campaign management tools,” adds Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research. 

Twilio’s 2021 State of Customer Engagement Report shows that emails, texts, alerts and other digital touchpoints increased by 63% in 2020, and that the volume of digital interactions rose by 54%. 

However, 43% of brands find that getting accurate customer data for personalization is a challenge. 

This year, Twilio has powered 25 billion calls, 127 billion messages, and 1 trillion emails, it says.