Amplitude Engage: Behavioral Targeting for Automated Campaign Personalization

Editor’s note: Amplitude Engage was rebranded to Amplitude Audiences in August 2022.

In today’s noisy channels, it’s more important than ever to engage the right user at the right time with the right message. Anyone that sends campaigns knows this is easier said than done.

Teams invest time and money in advanced marketing tools to automate campaign development and delivery. In spite of this, the best they can do is blast large portions of their database with a single message and hope that it stands out to at least some of their users. That’s because they are missing the context of their users’ behavior. Users send clear signals about where they are in their lifecycle, their preferences, and their intent, but teams are unable to act on that data in campaigns.

We’re changing this with Amplitude Engage.

Introducing behavioral targeting with Amplitude Engage

Today we’re excited to launch Amplitude Engage, a behavioral targeting solution that helps companies act on their first-party behavioral marketing data in campaigns. Amplitude Engage makes timely, targeted campaigns possible by extending the power of Amplitude into the marketing tools you use.

Here’s how behavioral targeting with Amplitude Engage works.

Behavioral Segmentation

Go beyond big email blasts or catch-all push campaigns based on demographics by using Amplitude to instantly segment and validate audiences by lifecycle, content preferences, usage or purchase history, and intent. Push the custom user segments you build to in-app messaging and marketing tools to power timely, personalized experiences. Do this without leaving Amplitude—no need to manually export CSV files from Amplitude and into another tool.

Dynamic Targeting

Configure scheduled syncs that automatically update user segments every hour or every day to support programmatic campaigns. Use on-demand syncs to send a test audience or for ad-hoc campaigns. Create a seamless experience for your users by sending the same segment to all of your in-app messaging and marketing tools such as Airship, Braze, Intercom, Marketo, and Facebook.

Impact Measurement

Finally, see how campaigns impact in-product user behavior back in Amplitude. Use Amplitude to optimize for recurring business value by instantly seeing campaign impact on usage frequency, repeat purchases, retention, and in-product conversion.

With these three steps, Amplitude with Amplitude Engage helps companies deliver tailored campaigns to specific audiences in the context of their behavior. Ultimately, this means less spam for consumers and more efficient programs for marketers.

How Amplitude Engage helped Rappi reduce acquisition costs with tailored experiences

The team at Rappi, South America’s leading on-demand delivery service, was looking for a more efficient and effective way to activate their new users. They were used to using demographic targeting to blast mass campaigns out to all new users a few times a month—but even this was a painful process. They needed to download a CSV file of their latest signups, manually upload the list into their messaging tool, and then make high-level assumptions about content and timing.

When the team started using Amplitude Engage with Braze, their strategy changed.

First, the team used Amplitude to identify four new user segments that showed unique patterns of behavior. Then, they used Amplitude Engage to automatically sync these user segments to Braze on an hourly basis. Once in Braze, the team was able to send out customized campaigns based on the behaviors of that segment.

Using behavioral targeting with Amplitude Engage and Braze resulted in massive improvements: Rappi was able to simultaneously reduce acquisition costs by 30% and increase first-time orders by 10% using Amplitude Engage.

For the full story on how Rappi uses Amplitude and Amplitude Engage, read our case study.

Dynamic targeting with Amplitude Engage

If you’re a user of Amplitude, you might already be manually exporting user segments from Amplitude into marketing tools like Braze, just like the team at Rappi. This gets incredibly tedious and time-consuming when you need to hit multiple user segments via multiple channels; and, to keep your campaign targeting relevant, you would need to do this process regularly so your segment stays up-to-date.

Engage removes the friction of needing to download and upload your user segments into your marketing tools—you can push and sync your segments with a click of a button, all without leaving Amplitude.

Here are the details.

Types of syncs

With Engage, you can turn on two categories of syncs within Amplitude.

• On-demand Syncs are one-time pushes of segments from Amplitude to a destination. This type of sync is ideal for one-off, ad hoc campaigns or for audience testing.
• Scheduled Syncs are recurring syncs of segments from Amplitude to a destination. Currently these can be set to recur on an hourly or daily basis to keep segments automatically updated in your marketing tools. This type of sync is ideal for lifecycle engagement or programmatic campaigns.

All Amplitude customers on paid plans have 50 on-demand syncs per month; teams interested in scheduled syncing will need to upgrade to the Amplitude Engage add-on. Read more documentation about Engage here.

Built-in connectors

Currently, Amplitude has built-in integrations available to Airship, Braze, Facebook, Intercom, Iterable, Leanplum, Marketo, and Segment. Google Marketing Platform, mParticle, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud will be available soon, and many more are on the way.

Helping teams across industries do more, with better campaigns

In November 2018, we launched a beta of Amplitude Engage under the name Cohort Sync; since then, we’ve seen customers across all industries drive more ROI with personalized campaigns. In addition to Rappi, Engage has helped our customers:

• Programmatically target hundreds of customer segments: Flipp, a leading platform for digital retail circulars/ads, now seamlessly automates hundreds of personalized campaigns which has helped increase click-thru-rates by over 20%.
• Boost in-product engagement: iflix, South East Asia’s leading on-demand video service, grew campaign conversion-to-view rates by 300% with targeted campaigns based on users’ actual behavior.
• Rapidly test new segments: Dave, a financial management platform, drove over 500,000 conversions to a new product by rapidly testing variations of customer segments — a process that now takes 5 seconds, instead of 5 days. Read our full case study with Dave here.

It’s been exciting to see the fast growth of companies using Amplitude Engage—over one hundred companies to date have used Amplitude Engage, sending over 550,000 syncs in 2019 alone! If you’re interested in learning more about Engage, visit amplitude.com/engage, and if you’re an Amplitude customer, reach out to us to talk about your options for a free trial.