March 2026 Summaries

Marketing data platforms are integral tools for unifying customer data across channels, enabling teams to deliver personalized and timely messages to drive growth. A marketing data platform collects, organizes, and activates customer data to ensure that messages are tailored to the right audience at the right time, connecting various data sources with messaging channels like email, push, SMS, in-app, and chat. This text reviews the top seven platforms, each catering to different needs: Knock for cross-channel messaging with shared infrastructure; Segment for centralized data pipelines; Braze for enterprise-level campaign orchestration; Customer.io for product-led, event-driven messaging; Iterable for AI-driven B2C campaigns; HubSpot Marketing Hub for small to mid-market teams needing combined CRM and marketing automation; and OneSignal for budget-friendly push notifications. When choosing a platform, factors such as cross-channel orchestration, data integration, team collaboration, scalability, reliability, and transparent pricing should be considered, as these determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the messaging infrastructure.

Intercom is a popular customer service platform that excels in live chat and AI-powered support, but it may not meet the needs of teams seeking advanced messaging orchestration and multi-channel communication capabilities. Alternatives such as Knock offer cross-functional collaboration with developer-friendly APIs and visual tools for managing messaging across various channels, making it suitable for B2B SaaS and healthcare products. Customer.io is ideal for product-led growth teams requiring event-driven lifecycle messaging, while OneSignal focuses on mobile-first push notification delivery. Braze caters to enterprise marketing teams with AI-driven customer engagement, and Novu provides open-source notification infrastructure for engineering teams. Courier is designed for teams needing a visual template designer for multi-channel notifications, and Iterable supports marketing teams in orchestrating cross-channel campaigns. Each alternative provides distinct features, pricing models, and levels of control, allowing organizations to choose based on their specific technical requirements, team structure, and messaging needs.

Klaviyo, a marketing platform popular for ecommerce email and SMS campaigns, is often outgrown by teams needing more control, API flexibility, and cross-functional collaboration. While Klaviyo excels in traditional marketing scenarios, it falls short in transactional messaging, cross-channel orchestration, and pricing models, prompting organizations to explore alternatives. Various platforms offer solutions to these limitations: Knock provides comprehensive cross-channel customer engagement infrastructure, enabling collaboration across engineering, product, growth, and operations teams with API-first infrastructure and visual tools. Customer.io caters to product-led SaaS companies needing behavior-driven messaging, while Braze and Iterable serve enterprise marketing teams with real-time and AI-powered campaign orchestration, respectively. OneSignal offers a cost-effective push notification service, Novu provides open-source notification infrastructure, and Courier offers a unified API for developers managing multi-channel notifications. Each alternative addresses specific needs, such as transactional messaging, cross-functional collaboration, and budget constraints, offering more channels and flexibility than Klaviyo's marketing-centric model.

Knock has introduced a real-time dashboard for email API benchmarks, providing an objective comparison of email providers such as SendGrid, Resend, and Postmark based on performance metrics like response time and error rate. This initiative aims to fill the gap left by subjective resources, offering data collected from billions of API requests processed annually. The dashboard includes metrics computed using precise quantile calculations and tracks the ratio of error responses, helping users assess provider resilience in time-sensitive scenarios. Providers are ranked by adoption trends and correlated with public incidents for a comprehensive performance overview. Additionally, the platform features modeled pricing curves and a side-by-side comparison tool, allowing users to evaluate costs alongside performance when considering a provider change. Knock plans to expand the dashboard's metrics, including deliverability and time-to-inbox, and encourages community feedback to enhance this resource.

Knock has introduced data functions, a new feature enabling users to write data back to the platform during workflow runs, fundamentally altering how Knock can be utilized. These functions allow for the updating of user, tenant, and object properties, as well as audience memberships and workflow data scopes, ensuring that records are enriched and up-to-date, facilitating improved segmentation, personalization, and eligibility for additional messaging. Previously, Knock workflows were read-only, but the introduction of data functions now permits direct interaction with stored data, enhancing the platform's capabilities. This feature allows workflows to reflect real-time product actions by updating relevant properties instantly, maintaining accurate conditions for messaging logic, and enabling enriched tenant properties with AI outputs. Consequently, Knock can now serve as a live system of record, enriching records during workflows, keeping audience data precise, and ensuring messages are sent in the most relevant context. Data functions are available to all Knock customers, and further information is accessible through Knock's documentation.

Newsletters are an essential tool for SaaS companies to engage and re-engage users by delivering timely, relevant content that bridges the gap between product updates and marketing efforts. When executed effectively, newsletters can highlight new features, share educational content, and showcase community achievements, fostering trust and encouraging users to revisit the product. Successful newsletters maintain a clear purpose, consistent voice, and engaging design, which keeps users interested and encourages habitual readership. However, many newsletters fail due to content scarcity, inconsistency, and poor design, leading to disengagement. The most effective newsletters are tailored to their audience, offering actionable content with clear calls-to-action, while maintaining a predictable structure and visual style. Timing and frequency are crucial, with consistent scheduling building trust and reducing unsubscribe rates. Companies should choose the right tools to manage newsletters, often integrating them with existing product messaging systems to ensure consistent branding and personalized content. Knock is highlighted as a solution to manage newsletters and other cross-channel notifications, providing a cohesive customer experience.

Knock has introduced an AI agent function designed to integrate AI model capabilities, including web search, into workflows for data enrichment, personalized messaging, and content summarization. When a workflow reaches an AI agent step, Knock combines a user-defined prompt with contextual data and sends it to the selected AI model, storing the response for use in subsequent workflow steps. Users can choose from different model tiers, each with varying credit costs, and utilize web search for additional data enrichment. The AI agent supports prompt creation with JSON schemas for structured data responses, ensuring usability for personalization and enrichment. Testing can be done without consuming credits, and the function operates on a credit model, with varying credit allocations depending on the plan. The AI agent function is now available for all non-enterprise accounts, offering free credits to developer and starter plans.