Vizury launches Engage Commerce, a hyper-personalization tool for every marketer

Driving personalized marketing messages to the right person in the right place at the right time and on the right channel isn’t easy. If it were, we’d all be able to kiss spammy advertising goodbye and say hello to ads that feel more like personal assistants.

But hope is on the horizon, as more personalized marketing vendors enter the marketplace with a focus on providing tools that are easy to use.

Today, Vizury — a growth-marketing technology company — has announced its entry in the hyper-personalization space: Engage Commerce.

I spoke with Chetan Kulkarni, cofounder and CEO at Vizury, during Postback 2016, where he showed me a preview of today’s release. If there is one phrase that describes what I saw, “easy like a Sunday morning” would just about sum it up.

“For us, it is all about three distinct pillars: Data, technology, and marketing,” Kulkarni said. “How do you use data and technology to make marketing happen?”

This underlines a distinct change from the way marketing has worked in the past. While marketing used to be seen as an out-and-out cost, the (perfect) marketing department is now responsible for profit and loss, and marketing itself is seen as an investment toward increased revenues. Well — that’s how it is supposed to work in the 21st century.

But, as seen with the current state of app marketing, a lot of money is being spent on user acquisition, and that isn’t always the most effective strategy. “Improving engagement is the answer to increased and sustainable revenues,” Kulkarni said. “Personalized marketing helps to increase engagement and loyalty and promote advocacy.”

So how does Engage Commerce work?

Working from a simple dashboard, Kulkarni showed me how to create customer segments. Many users will simply choose the segments already created by the system, such as users who haven’t interacted with you in the last 30 days. The system is powerful enough to predict activity too, such as determining users who are likely to uninstall an app.

“Once segmented, you can send push notifications that are a rich media, mini version of your website,” Kulkarni said. “Our messages can include customized and personalized information to increase engagement and effectiveness.”

The personalized notifications are scrollable, and deep-linked within the app to open the product view directly upon clicking, eliminating the need for external web pages.

Push notifications is one way the solution will interact with consumers, but what do you do with the 83 percent of target prospects and customers who don’t respond to a push message? Engage Commerce will continue the conversation by retargeting those non-responders via personalized Facebook advertising.

In fact, Engage Commerce works across multiple channels: Push messages, Facebook, programmatic (which has over 30 distinct channels, including the Rubicon Project), in-app messaging, and — of course — email. It also supports carousel messages, which are the “advert du jour” for product marketers on Facebook.

As well as customer segments, Engage Commerce talks to your ecommerce platform to create other types of personalized output. For example, how about kicking off a message when the price drops on a particular product someone is interested in? Engage Commerce can handle that, as well as most transaction-based segments.

However, connecting Engage Commerce to your platform is not as simple as clicking a button.

“We do create connections to ecommerce platforms,” Kulkarni said. “These are custom connections, developed as needed, which allow us to provide multi-channel campaigns whenever a commerce-based action happens.”

As you’d expect from any marketing platform, Engage Commerce provides full analytics to help you understand how your audience is responding to the messages you send, which can help you make adjustments and improve over time. It provides data for messages delivered, clicks, clickthrough rate, conversions, sales revenue, and more.

Engage Commerce is an easy-to-use tool. Kulkarni was able to show me just how powerfully simple it is first-hand. And right now, the personalized marketing industry needs tools that are this deceptively simple in order to attract marketers, who tend to think hyper-personalization is only for the biggest organizations.

So what’s next for Vizury and the Engage Commerce tool?

“We want to help the marketer think about adtech and martech together,” Kulkarni said. “The challenge we’re trying to solve is to make marketing start with the user and build campaigns that are customer-centric. Our next updates will take us there.”

Vizury Engage Commerce is available from today. Pricing is based on a per user per month fee plus a usage fee per channel.