[Release Announcement] Custom Targeting – the ultimate solution to Cart Abandonment problem and other challenges faced in in-site marketing

I am glad to break this news to you – custom targeting based on application specific parameters, is now available inside WebEngage. There is now a new section for custom rules in your survey and notification builder.

Prelude:
As you’d know, we always allowed you to “target” a survey or notification at specific audiences on your website through a built-in targeting engine, with filtering criterion like – cookies, visitor’s geography, time spent on the site, page URL patterns of your site etc (more here). As a natural extension of this engine, we have now made it possible to target based on parameters that are specific to your application. We call this “custom targeting”.

What is custom targeting?
In layman terms, it lets you run campaigns and promotions based on deep, application specific rules. Lemme explain with a few examples:

1. [E-commerce] Cart Abandonment: You can use notifications to run promotions on the checkout page for, say, users who have added items to the cart but haven’t checked out in 60 seconds. Using custom targeting, you can optionally configure to run these promotions only for a certain value of the cart size or number of items in cart or only for items from a certain category … (ref: image below)
   

   Address cart abandonment issue on your website using WebEngage Notification's custom targeting

2. [E-commerce] Happy hour promotions: Always wondered why only bars and pubs have a happy hour? We felt the same and hence we created targeting based on time-of-the-day. Now, using custom targeting, you can run category specific promotions on your website for the “dull hours” like a pro (ref: image below)
   

   Run happy hour promotions on your website

3. [All Web Applications] Hyper Targeted Messaging and Promotions: Don’t you want to pamper your “Gold customers” by telling them how much you love them? Do you want to offer a 10% off for customers who have not made a purchase in the last 3 months? Do you want to announce a special on-boarding message for “paid only customers” of your SaaS app? No matter what your application specific use-case is, custom targeting is designed to make all this work from the comfort of a powerful dashboard (ref: image below)
   

   Get love from your customers - display hyper targeted Notification messages

4. [E-commerce] Promotions for SEM/SEO Traffic + Product Categories: Let’s say, you wanted to convert a visitor who came via your SEO/SEM spend into a buyer. You intend to offer a discount code to this visitor if she is browsing the catalog for slow-moving category items. You can configure a marketing-promotion notification with a discount code for such visitors. Using custom targeting, you can tell us what those slow moving categories are, and we can take care of the rest (ref: image below)
   

   Maximize the ROI on your SEM/SEM spend. Run specific campaigns

5. [All Web Applications] Customer Profiling: There is so much more to know about your customers than what Google Analytics could tell you. To make informed decisions, say hello to WebEngage surveys. You can use it to pop customer profiling survey at first time visitors on your website once they have spent, say, 2 minutes on the site. Do you want such surveys only for the fairer sex? Using custom targeting, you can achieve that (ref: image below)
   

   Custom targeting at its best - run customer profiling surveys (or promotions) for female customers only

I can go on, for this list is endless. But, I am sure you get the point. We are doing our bit to make in-site marketing and customer engagement a data and experimentation driven science. Hope you like what you see. Your comments on this post will hugely boost our morale.

As our philosophy has always been, custom targeting doesn’t need any code changes over and over on your website. You have to make sure that you are passing all the parameters of interest to you, through our API, and be assured that you’ll not need to change any code on your website – the rules can be modified in real-time from your WebEngage Dashboard.

Note: Custom targeting is only available under the Premium and Enterprise plans. If you are an existing customer, you’ll see this option in targeting section for each of your surveys and notifications. Have questions? Please get in touch.

Stay tuned. We love you!

- Avlesh