Capping off a year of helping our customers do more with less—and what we’re building towards in 2024.

Marketing used to be exclusively a one-to-many endeavor—think TV, radio, billboard or magazine advertising. But as channels have gotten noisier and consumers have gotten savvier, being able to communicate at the 1:1 level is the new standard and expectation from customers.

Attentive started with an idea to transform the way businesses and consumers communicate. We were early pioneers of mobile-first, personalized marketing. We’ve always focused on how we can help marketers deliver the best consumer experience to drive engagement, loyalty, and of course, conversion. With the recent advances in AI technology, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished this year and equally as importantly, how we continue to walk (and often, run) in step with our customers. 

We’ve helped our customers break through the noise, adapt to industry changes, execute on cutting-edge strategies, learn from our team and each other, and enter into a new era of marketing—one that’s going to increasingly be shaped by AI. 

For the past few years, our team has closed out the calendar year by reflecting on all the ways we’ve helped our customers succeed (and came together to exceed lofty goals, while still having fun). This year, it felt right to take a more personal approach to celebrating our employees, customers, and partners—and to share a bit about how I’m thinking about the future. I’m incredibly excited for what’s to come.  

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2023 was a year of growth, execution, and connection 

Before I dive into my vision for 2024 and the big investments we are making, I want to take a moment to celebrate what our team accomplished in 2023. This is undoubtedly the busiest time of year for our customers—congratulations, you made it through BFCM 2023! This is a moment we’ve been working towards all year. Every day, our Product, Engineering, Client Strategy, Marketing, Sales, and People teams show up to contribute to our company’s vision—to deliver magical conversations. In big and small interactions, I see how our team operates from our company’s values.

When I look back at this year, I see a lot to celebrate. Here are just a few highlights:

• We helped 8,000+ brands send over 29 billion text messages, 2.2 billion of which went out over Cyber Week and resulted in over $1.8 billion in revenue—our biggest Cyber Week ever.
• We introduced our Attentive Email to help marketers seamlessly orchestrate their SMS and email strategies.
• We unveiled our AI product, purpose-built for marketers, and trained on over 2 trillion data points from 78+ billion messages across 70+ verticals for the highest performance outcomes.
• Our customer conference, Thread World Tour, hit the road, bringing together customers across 9 cities including New York, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and more. Some of the most innovative marketing leaders came together for Luminaries to network and idea share.
• Our team’s work has been recognized by some of the biggest names in business. For the third year in a row, Attentive landed on the Deloitte Fast 500. We were in great company on G2’s Best New Software Products list, Forbes’ Cloud 100 list, and won Best Generative AI Platform from the AI Breakthrough Awards. 
• We continued to expand our platform and service internationally, adding access in 20+ countries.
• We also know that seamless integration across the marketing tech stack is critical for getting the most out of your customer data. We launched our Agency and Technology Partner Program, and announced partnerships with enterprise-grade platforms including Salesforce and Bazaarvoice. 
• We continue to invest in our core SMS platform, launching over 50+ new features.

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From best-in-class SMS to AI-powered SMS and email

In 2023, we made a significant transition from being an SMS marketing company to a conversational marketing platform that enables marketers to deliver personalized experiences to customers across both SMS and email. In March, we introduced Attentive AI™, and today, we're committed to expanding our vision for helping marketers deliver the sorts of truly personalized experiences they’ve only dreamt of in the past. 

With the largest dataset in the business and our phone-number-centered identity solution, we’re building the most robust AI-powered performance marketing platform—one that will empower marketers to deliver personalized messages to customers based on their individual behaviors, all through the power of generative AI.

Already, over 80% of our customers are using AI to not only save time, but to deliver even better results. But we’re just getting started. In the coming months, we’ll be rapidly building new features and tools that will give marketers more power to analyze mountains of data, and then use AI to craft individualized messages for every customer on their subscriber list. And they won’t need a team of data analysts or data scientists to do it.

My experience building mobile commerce brands that transformed retail and e-commerce has taught me that despite great strides, no one has yet cracked the opportunity to create true two-way conversations between brands and customers that are dialed into individual behaviors, are on brand, are able to remove barriers to purchase, and can do it all without an insurmountable amount of manual work. That is, until now. 

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What you’ll see from us in the coming months

I deeply believe that our technology, our team, and the momentum we are seeing from the industry position us to deliver the kind of platform and service that marketers have only dreamt of until now. 

Our goal is to fulfill “the last mile” of personalization.

• Evolution of digital marketing: There has never been a more exciting time to be developing marketing technology. Digital marketing is experiencing yet another renaissance, but this one is going to unlock marketers’ ability to do what they do best—deliver delightful experiences in innovative ways. We’re going to see an incredible spike in creativity and innovation that will drive revenue for merchants by turning browsers into buyers. 
• True 1:1 interactions: Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time has always been the gold standard for marketing. Now, brands will be able to actually live up to this promise. 
• Dynamic conversations and AI: Chatbots be gone! No, seriously. Anyone who’s engaged with a chatbot in the last five years knows how painful the experience is. But the joy of connecting with a person and actually getting an appropriate response can't be understated. This new era of AI will give brands the opportunity to deliver on the promise of the chatbot.  

The last twelve months have been some of the most dynamic we’ve ever seen in technology, but they’ve only set the stage for the innovation that’s yet to come. We’re thrilled to be leading the way on this journey in partnership with our customers. We can’t wait to see what the next twelve months have in store.

Are you ready to come build the future with us? We’re hiring. Want to get a headstart on your 2024 marketing? Sign up for our AI waitlist.