Twilio launches Twilio Engage, eyes marketing automation

Twilio launched Twilio Engage, an automation platform designed for marketers to deliver campaigns across multiple channels.

For the company, Twilio Engage is part of a broader plan to offer a complete customer engagement stack. Twilio recently acquired Segment and now has a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) that includes Twilio Engage for marketing, Twilio Frontline for sales and Twilio Flex for customer service.

Twilio Engage, announced at the company’s Signal 2021 conference, is built on Segment’s customer data platform and Twilio’s communication application programming interfaces (APIs). The platform is designed to enable marketers to mix and match tools, data integration, analytics and messaging.

By tackling marketing automation, Twilio is taking aim at marketing suites from the likes of Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and a bevy of others targeting business-to-consumer companies. Separately, ServiceNow said it will launch the ServiceNow Messaging Service using Twilio’s platform to improve hybrid employee experiences.

Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, said Twilio Engage represents what the company can bring together. “Our vision is to democratize personalization, so companies of every size can now deliver the tailored interactions customers today expect anywhere they interact,” he said.

Here’s a look at the Twilio Engage architecture.

Twilio Engage includes:

• Email and SMS messaging along with more than 400 integrations built in.
• Behavior based automation and experimentation tools to test out campaigns.
• Personalization based on first party data across channels.
• APIs to connect with multiple tools in the marketing stack.
• Messaging optimization.
• Campaign dashboards to monitor engagement, troubleshoot and optimize.

Here’s a screenshot. 

Twilio Engage is in pilot with general availability expected in the first quarter.