CleverTap is the all-in-one engagement platform that helps brands unlock limitless customer lifetime value.
Engagement platform CleverTap earlier this year released its market research report on ‘The State of App and Web User Experience Optimisation’. The report shed light on how digital-first brands are leveraging experimentation and personalisation on their apps and websites to drive customer engagement and business growth. It also highlights roadblocks faced by marketers and product managers while experimenting with the UI, workflows, and functionality across apps and websites.
While 95% of surveyed product managers and 88% of marketers believe that the right user experience is essential for driving customer engagement and retention — many report significant challenges to effectively experimenting with app and web user experiences.
Despite recognising its importance, they reported difficulties such as limited resources, data gaps, and technical constraints that hinder their ability to innovate and deliver impactful user experiences.
Medianews4u caught up with Jacob Joseph, VP Data Science CleverTap.
Q. How is the festive season looking like for CleverTap compared with last year?
We’re always excited when the festive season comes around. It’s the time when our customers are at their busiest—traffic spikes, campaigns multiply, and competition is at its peak. But it’s also when we get to deliver some of our best work.
Because festive campaigns can’t afford friction, the pressure on experience and engagement is higher than at any other time of year. That’s why we see the festive season as both a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge, because the margin for error is so slim. An opportunity, because the innovations that work here often go on to shape how brands engage with their users year-round.
Q. This is when brands see their biggest spikes in traffic — but also their toughest battles for attention. What tactics will CleverTap employ to help clients drive attention?
Festive marketing often turns into a decibel war with everyone shouting and few actually being heard. But attention isn’t a volume game; it’s a relevance game. The brands that win aren’t the ones sending more messages; they’re the ones sending messages that blend into intent, not bulldoze over it.
That’s why our approach is inclusive of restraint. We help brands identify when not to engage just as much as when to. If your timing is off, even the best creative feels like spam. Instead, we focus on intent signals; micro-moments that suggest a customer is ready to engage, and pair that with real-time orchestration so the message lands in the right context, on the right channel, at the right moment.
Q. Have discounts become a commodity during the festive season? With everyone shouting about the discount offers maybe it is not that special anymore.
Discounts used to be the hook. Today, they’re hygiene. The novelty fades, and what should feel exciting turns into background static.
What still works is how you position value. While a generic markdown is a race to the bottom; a context-aware offer feels personal and timely. For instance, if someone leaves running shoes in their cart and you remind them just as they’re looking at other fitness gear, it feels like a helpful nudge—not a hard sell.
Sure, discounts pull people in. That’s never going to change. But keeping them interested? That’s where relevance does the heavy lifting. If the offer doesn’t feel like it was made for me, it’s just another number on a banner. When it feels like it fits me, that’s when it works.
Q. How will CleverTap use tech advances to help brands bring freshness to the messaging?
With Product Experiences, brands can update app flows, banners, or CTAs instantly, without waiting for long release cycles—so festive campaigns stay in sync with fast-moving trends. Our Scribe AI assistant helps marketers generate personalized copy at scale, ensuring that no two nudges feel generic.
With Promos, brands can roll out timely offers targeted to the right segments, rather than blasting discounts everywhere. And with Reminders, we’ve seen how the smallest contextual nudge can have outsized impact; a financial services client earns over $1 million in added monthly revenue just through timely payment nudges triggered by user behavior.
Additionally, our predictions engine identifies user intent by grouping them into high, medium, and low-intent cohorts; allowing brands to prioritize who needs a gentle nudge versus who is already ready to convert. Recommendations help users discover the right product faster, reducing friction during peak shopping windows.
Together, these tools help brands move beyond static campaigns to dynamic, context-aware engagement. The result is messaging that feels fresh, useful, and personal.
Q. What trends will we see in moment marketing in things like the timing of a nudge, the relevance of a recommendation that can drive conversion?
During the festive season, the way intent works is different from the rest of the year. A single action by an individual often signals the desires of an entire group. In India especially, festivals are collective occasions, one person browsing décor or festive hampers is rarely buying for themselves alone. That behavior often reflects household or community demand.
The smartest moment marketing strategies pick up on this multiplier effect. They recognise that a single data point—a search, a cart add, a view—may represent a whole cluster of upcoming purchases. Brands that can respond to intent not just at the individual level but at the collective level create campaigns that feel more relevant and resonate more deeply.
The other big shift is speed. Festive windows are short and unforgiving. Waiting weeks to test and learn is no longer viable. The brands that succeed are not just those with the best creative idea, but those who can experiment and adapt the fastest. And it’s not just about swapping copy or banners anymore, the real edge is in testing entire journeys in real time, at speed and scale. A checkout nudge, a localized festive flow, a push notification; all optimized on the fly, not in hindsight.
Q. Could you shed light on why personalisation and timing matter most when competition is at its peak?
Because during the festive surge, customers aren’t starved for choices, they’re drowning in them. Every irrelevant message you send isn’t just ignored; it chips away at the attention quota you could have stood to earn.
Personalisation solves part of that problem, but timing is the multiplier. In peak competition, relevance has to extend down to the individual: understanding a user’s behavior, preferences, and context in real time. A perfect recommendation at the wrong moment may feel creepy or pointless. A well-timed message without context feels like spam. When both align, you create a moment that feels intentional: “This brand gets me, right now.”
That’s why timing and personalisation can’t be treated as blunt-force automation. It’s really about orchestration; the art of pacing, sequencing, and knowing when to engage so that, in the middle of all the noise, every interaction feels intentional and earned.
Q. A couple of years back CleverTap launched its AI-generated content creator Scribe. What progress has this made? What other innovations can one expect?
Since its launch, Scribe has grown into more than just a content generator. Initially positioned to help teams produce and test variations of marketing copy, it now functions as a creative co-pilot, analyzing and optimizing for emotional tone, language, and audience preferences.
All the while, it ensures brand tonality is preserved so the output never slips into generic messaging. By integrating OpenAI models, Scribe enables marketers to quickly generate personalised messages that match the customer’s stage in the journey.
For instance, Scribe can tailor content length for SMS vs push notifications, rewrite subject lines to spark curiosity, or suggest calls-to-action tuned to different demographic cohorts. This has sped up experimentation cycles dramatically, marketers can test dozens of variations in minutes instead of days. It has also helped reduce creative fatigue internally, freeing teams to focus on campaign strategy rather than repetitive copywriting.
Looking ahead, the real shift in marketing AI will be from static assistance to adaptive intelligence. Agentic AI systems won’t just generate content, they’ll be able to sense user context, test multiple approaches autonomously, and adjust in real time based on outcomes. Imagine a system that doesn’t just suggest a subject line, but also runs the experiment, monitors performance across cohorts, and tunes messaging mid-campaign.
That’s the direction we’re moving in: AI that collaborates with marketers as an active decision partner, not just a creative helper. The goal isn’t more automation for its own sake, but more relevance, speed, and impact in how brands engage their users.
Q. Is relying too much on the algorithm a trap that marketers fall into?
It can be. Algorithms are brilliant at one thing: optimizing for yesterday. They’re trained to exploit.
Marketers often hit what’s called the explore–exploit dilemma. In simple terms, it’s this: do you keep showing people what’s worked before, or do you try something new? If you only lean on past success, the system gets stuck in a loop—same products, same tone, same experience. After a while, people stop noticing. Engagement flattens because nothing feels fresh anymore.
That’s why human judgment matters. The algorithm should guide, not dictate. Marketers need to mix in exploration with exploitation, introduce variety, and set guardrails so the brand voice stays consistent. Features like IntelliNODE make this balance easier by letting teams experiment and explore multiple paths, while still doubling down on what works. AI can scale personalization, but it can’t sense when it’s starting to feel mechanical. That’s still a human skill.
Q. CleverTap serves customers across various industries such as fintech, media, food, travel, ecommerce. Could you talk about work recently done that stands out?
CleverTap’s impact is visible across verticals, but a recent example that stands out comes from financial services, where a leading player in India wanted to boost conversions in key product categories such as credit card upgrades and personal loan retargeting. The brand was facing challenges with high drop-offs and fragmented journeys, which were limiting engagement and outcomes.
By adopting CleverTap’s AI-powered capabilities — from real-time behavioral tracking to emotion-driven content and automated experimentation — they were able to deliver contextual, personalized nudges across channels like push notifications, WhatsApp, email, and in-app. This omnichannel approach ensured customers were guided at the right moment with messaging that resonated.
The results included a double-digit improvement in click-to-conversion rates for personal loans and a 27% increase in credit card upgrade conversions among users who had earlier dropped off. Just as important, the project showed how experimentation and optimization could be scaled while keeping the MarTech stack simple, which helped improve efficiency and ROI.
Q. During the festive season how important will it be for brands to enhance the in-app and web experience to drive sales and conversions? How does CleverTap’s Product Experiences help in this area?
Festive season is the most hectic time of the year for brands and marketers—but it’s also the time developers and product teams dread the most. Why? Because even something as small as changing a banner, tweaking a checkout prompt, or localizing a message usually means waiting on design cycles, approvals, or another release cycle. By the time the fix goes live, the moment and the user may already be gone.
That’s exactly why we built Product Experiences. It takes the friction out of making in-app and web changes when speed matters most. Marketers can instantly update flows, CTAs, or festive offers, without writing new code or pushing a fresh release. They can A/B test different journeys in real time to see what actually drives conversions, and double down on the winning path right away.
And it’s not just speed, it’s the control. With feature flags and targeted rollouts, teams can launch festive features gradually, test them safely, and roll them back if needed. No downtime, no disruption, no firefighting.
In peak season, where traffic is high and attention spans are short, these micro-optimizations make the difference between an abandoned cart and a completed sale. Product Experiences puts that control in the hands of marketers, without overloading developers, so brands can turn festive demand into real conversions.
Q. Will AI chatbots play a big role in hyper personalisation which is a key focus across categories?
Absolutely, but only if we stop confusing personalization with personality. Hyper-personalisation isn’t about making bots sound more human; it’s to make them less robotic in how they solve problems.
The best chatbots don’t just regurgitate scripts. They remember your last interaction, predict what you’re likely to do next, and know when to hand you over to a human instead of trapping you in an endless loop. That’s what real personalization feels like: less friction, more foresight.
It’s not about the warmest conversation; it’s about a smart one. That’s the point where AI stops being a gimmick and moves the growth needle.
Q. What is the business model of CleverTap and is it tied to driving outcomes for clients?
CleverTap’s business model is subscription-based and tied closely to usage: specifically, the number of monthly active users (MAUs), events processed, and certain tiers/features required by the client.
Because of this design, we have a direct incentive to help our clients drive real outcomes: better retention, higher engagement, greater conversions. As a brand’s MAU grows and usage intensifies (more in-app events, more push notifications, more sessions, etc.), the value they get from CleverTap should rise, and with it, their success. When they succeed, we succeed.
Q. According to data analytics, where is the whitespace for growth for CleverTap?
When people talk about whitespace in growth, they often point to new industries or markets. But the real gap we see today is functional: the orchestration layer in Agentic AI.
Right now, brands are experimenting with GenAI tools, and often, taking a piecemeal approach: one system for copy, another for bidding, another for chatbots. Each works in isolation, but together they are prone to creating a chaotic zoo of overlapping automations, inconsistent tone, and missed signals. Without orchestration, you risk a system that is faster but only at creating double work for you.
The whitespace is in building the connective tissue; an orchestration layer that can talk across channels, data sources, and AI agents to ensure the marketing function runs as a smooth, coordinated ship. That means aligning when to send a push notification versus an in-app banner, how to balance personalization with restraint, and how to prevent multiple systems from spamming the same user.
From a data science perspective, this is where predictive, generative, and prescriptive AI converge: predicting what a user might do, generating content that resonates, and prescribing the next best action across every channel.
That’s the opportunity we see, not just more AI, but better-governed AI. For CleverTap, growth comes from helping brands make the leap from fragmented automation to orchestrated intelligence. It’s not about adding more tools into the stack; it’s about making the stack coherent, efficient, and user-first.
Q. CleverTap operates in 50 countries. What are the similarities and differences between India and other markets?
India is a quintessentially diverse market. Marketers here work across dozens of languages and dialects, multiple modes of connectivity, and devices that range from entry-level feature phones to the most advanced smartphones. That sheer scale, combined with diversity, makes India unlike any other country we operate in. You don’t just design for millions, you design for millions of different experiences happening all at once.
One of the biggest differences we see is in infrastructure constraints shaping user behavior. In many parts of India, connectivity is still patchy or data remains expensive. That makes lightweight design, offline modes, and low-bandwidth engagement strategies far more critical than in Western markets, where “always-on” connectivity is taken for granted. A message or nudge that assumes high-speed internet can miss large swaths of the Indian user base.
Another distinction is the trust gap. Indian users tend to be more skeptical of digital promises, often because of the frequency of fraud and spam exposure. That means brands can’t rely only on personalization or flashy offers—they need to build confidence over time with transparency, consistency, and relevance. Winning a user’s trust here often takes more work, but once earned, loyalty is stronger.
At the same time, some fundamentals remain the same everywhere. Users respond positively when engagement feels timely, personal, and respectful. The difference in India is that the stakes are amplified. A small improvement in retention here doesn’t just move a percentage point on a chart; it can translate into millions of additional engaged users.
That’s why we see India as both a challenge and a proving ground. If you can build experiences that work across India’s diversity, constraints, and scale, you can be confident they’ll hold up in the global market.
