A decade of data experience: Insider seamlessly delivers personalized messaging across channels

A decade of data experience: Insider seamlessly delivers personalized messaging across channels 

These days, an email stands out if it lacks personalization—and not in a good way. According to Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report, 64% of consumers say they would quit a brand if their experience isn’t personalized. On top of that, 39% of consumers say their spending would increase with improved AI-driven engagement.

In the world of marketing technology, Insider has over a decade of experience providing brands with a comprehensive platform to seamlessly deliver personalized interactions across channels. By leveraging AI to analyze customer behavior and predict future actions, Insider empowers marketers to maximize conversion rates, enhance engagement, and optimize customer lifetime value. With a client base spanning industries like retail, beauty, automotive, and more—including the likes of Puma, Samsung, and Coca-Cola—Insider’s focus on personalization and ease of use sets it apart.

We were able to sit down with Faraaz Khan, Insider’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, to talk about personalization, AI, and how they work with Twilio to help serve more than 1,300 brands.

Q: To start, tell us a little bit about Insider and your mission

A: Insider is a marketing technology company founded 11 years ago.  We’ve developed the easiest-to-use, all-in-one platform that enables top brands worldwide to deliver personalized, seamless customer experiences across every single channel that a marketer might want to use to reach their prospects and customers.

Our mission is to empower marketers by leveraging customer data and AI to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns that drive the highest conversion and ROI.

Q: Who are your customers and what problems are they facing? 

A: We support over 1,300 global brands across the world and have a strong presence in multiple industries and verticals, including retail and commerce, beauty and cosmetics, automotive, financial services, travel, hospitality, and telecommunications. We also serve brands all the way from the mid-market through to the largest brands in the world. 

Our clients face three major challenges:

• They want to improve their conversion rates

• They want to increase engagement with their end users on one of their digital properties, or across multiple digital properties

• They’re looking to reduce churn and maximize customer lifetime value

Ultimately, they seek to differentiate themselves by delivering highly relevant, personalized, and effective digital experiences to consumers.

Q: How does the scale of the Insider platform help solve these common business problems?

A: There are a few things that really sets Insider apart. Our platform is incredibly intuitive and easy to use, while catering to the largest variety of digital channels in the industry. Whether that’s email, SMS, mobile app, web, or social channels like TikTok and Instagram, we serve them all. Moreover, Insider was an e-commerce personalization tool at our inception, and because of this we’ve got decades-long experience in making data actionable for marketers. That’s the strength we’ve leveraged to invest and launch our generative AI capabilities, which we packaged together and launched as our Sirius AI solution in Q4 of 2023. 

We have sales and support teams in 26 countries to support businesses on a global scale. This local presence ensures our customers can effectively use our platform and deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized customer journeys.

Q: Consumers, especially the younger ones, want personalization. They don’t want to just be another cog in a machine. Has the rise of data, AI, and personalization impacted your roadmap, your business, your products, and your customers?

A: Ultimately, we see that brands are trying to reach their prospects, and customers—and they’re really struggling because consumers are constantly being bombarded by all kinds of marketing messages. To get the attention of consumers, you don’t need to just offer a better product, but a better and more personalized experience. Because if you don’t, it’s just going to get drowned out amidst all that noise.

In our experience,  leading brands are at the forefront of taking advantage of modern technologies like customer data management, personalization, and AI. This way, they can understand consumers better and reach them on the right channel, at the right time, with the most relevant marketing message personalized to their specific need. We’re helping our customers deliver better ROI as a result, and are ultimately helping consumers get a better online experience. 

Q: As a multi-channel marketing platform, what insights do you have on how businesses should be sending their communications?

A: I’ve been in the industry for a long time. And there’s this idea that email is going to die at some point. But what we see, even today, is that email is still king in terms of the channel that end users prefer—and is the one that brands end up using most in terms of outreach. The sheer volume of emails a consumer receives though, again highlights the need for a brand to make their email communication relevant and engaging.

In terms of newer channels, we’re seeing a lot of adoption in terms of messaging and social. SMS, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram have seen significant uptake from more and more mid-market, DTC brands. Now increasingly, we’re seeing some of the largest brands also focusing on these messaging and social media-related communication channels.

Q: How and why did you start building with Twilio?

A: As a global vendor, we need to cater to global clients on a global basis. Our expertise lies in creating an all-in-one platform that really makes the marketer’s job easier in terms of personalizing online experiences across multiple channels. The brands we serve also have massive scale in terms of their customer engagement needs. 

We were searching for a partner whose strength lay in that delivery layer, could handle the global nature of our clients’ needs, was massively scalable, and was affordable for our customers. 

Twilio ticked all of those boxes for us. Twilio’s capability to deliver an insanely high volume of messages and emails on a global scale set them apart and we’ve had a long-standing relationship that we truly value. We’ve developed Insider native integrations with Twilio SMS as well as with SendGrid. And those are the delivery layers that underpin a majority of our email and SMS solutions. 

We’ve also really invested in a really slick integration with Segment which allows brands to utilize all of the customer data that they’re collecting from billions of interactions online. We use the data that’s pushed to the Insider platform, in real time, to make sure that when a marketer is launching a campaign for their brand, it’s relevant and personalized for their customer. The best part is that the integrations are ready to use right out of the box and can get up and running as soon as the client is ready to use them.

Q: What are some big initiatives that you guys are investing in? 

A: There are a few big product launches that are on the horizon for us. We’re going to continue to invest in Sirius AI, which is our generative AI suite. A great roadmap feature we are excited about is AI-based content scoring which will give marketers predictive insights about the impact of marketing content for any given consumer.

Beyond AI, we’re enhancing our analytics within the platform so a CMO or other marketing leader can have an even more robust understanding of how their investments are performing and see board-level metrics that are most critical to them as leaders. We’re also really investing in our conversational commerce capability, particularly focusing on the WhatsApp channel. 

Q: What about the Insider platform are you most proud of? 

A: Being a really, truly customer-centered company, the stats that matter the most to us are the stats that matter to our customers. And, ultimately, what they really care about is the return on investment for their marketing dollars.

One of the main KPIs that we track, therefore, is revenue uplift and what our customers see after they implement Insider. Typically we see a 10-12x increase in return on investment within the first six months of a customer going live on Insider. Beyond that, when it comes to AI, over the past six months, between Q4 of 2023, and going into Q1 of 2024, we saw massive adoption of our AI suite. Over 1,000 of our 1,300 customers adopted capabilities from Sirius AI and well over 90% provided positive feedback and stated an intent to continue using Sirius AI. 

By combining Insider’s decade of data expertise with Twilio’s suite of communication tools, the AI-native platform provides a robust, comprehensive solution that simplifies marketers’ efforts while maximizing impact. This ensures that every campaign is not only effective but scalable and aligned with global demands.