How it works
From your data to a measured result
Connect your WiFi, tills, bookings and email list. Approve what your AI team stages. Where a holdout is set, see how many more guests came back, booked or bought than the guests you held back.
Do I need Purple WiFi to use Purple Engage?
No. Purple Engage is sold on its own and runs without Purple WiFi. You create your venues in Engage and bring guests in from your tills, your booking or hotel system, website forms, CSV imports and the API. If you do run Purple WiFi, each sign-in brings the guest's contact details and their marketing opt-in.
- Create venues directly in Engage, with no WiFi contract needed
- With Purple WiFi, your venues come across from Purple Portal and every sign-in adds a guest
- Visits come from a connected WiFi system: Purple WiFi, Cisco Spaces, Cisco Meraki or Juniper Mist. Without one, bookings and sales are still measured
How do I connect my customer data?
Through more than 30 connectors, most of them in beta, and your own systems. Sales, bookings, stays and sign-ups land on one guest record that segments, campaigns and measurement all read. Engage reads from your tills and never writes sales back to them.
- Tills: Square, Lightspeed X-Series, Epos Now, Loyverse and Oracle Simphony send sales into Engage
- Bookings and stays: ResDiary, Mews and apaleo
- CRM and tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Shopify, Stripe and Segment
- Your own systems: the public API, signed webhooks, website forms and CSV files over SFTP (secure file transfer)
Which WiFi systems can Engage read guest sign-ins from?
Purple WiFi, Cisco Spaces, Cisco Meraki and Juniper Mist. Each sign-in adds a guest and a visit at the venue where it happened. Accepting a portal's terms is never marketing consent, and Cisco Meraki and Juniper Mist send no consent by default, so those guests arrive unsubscribed until they opt in another way.
- Purple WiFi, with contact details and the email opt-in from each sign-in
- Cisco Spaces and Cisco Meraki
- Juniper Mist
What does setting up Purple Engage involve?
Five steps. Create or connect your venues, connect the systems that hold guest data and import the contacts you already have. Then add your own sending domain for email, and your own Twilio account if you want SMS or WhatsApp. After that you build segments and journeys, or ask your AI team to draft them.
- Create venues in Engage, or connect Purple WiFi to bring your venues across
- Connect your tills, bookings or hotel system from the integrations directory and map each of their locations to a venue
- Import contacts by CSV, confirming you hold consent and naming the channels it covers
- Authenticate your own sending domain for email, and connect your Twilio account for SMS and WhatsApp
- Build segments and journeys yourself, or ask the AI team to draft them in the same builders
Who decides what the AI team can do?
You do. The AI team prepares the work and a person decides. By default, each send, publish or ad launch it stages stops for a preview of the exact action, and the AI can never launch or fund an ad. The AI marketing team page sets out how approvals work.
- By default, each send, publish or ad launch stops for a preview of the exact action. Ads are never launched or funded by the AI
- Outside AI assistants connected through the Engage MCP server can read, draft and ask for approval, never send
How does Engage show a campaign worked?
Where a holdout is set, it compares guests who were sent a campaign with guests held back on purpose. A holdout is a group deliberately not sent the campaign, used to measure what it really caused. You see the extra share who came back, booked or bought, with a 95% range. The AI team holds back 5% of the email campaigns it stages.
- Extra return visits, bookings and purchases against a held-back group, with gross takings for each group
- Below 50 guests held back, the result says so in words instead of showing a figure
Can I move over from my current tools without starting again?
Yes. You do not have to replace everything at once. Import your list with its consent, run Engage beside your current tools for a cycle, then move each channel across when you are ready.
- Import by CSV with consent confirmed and the original channels named. An import cannot undo an opt-out the guest made
- Run both for a cycle: the Mailchimp connector syncs guests and consent both ways, and a Mailchimp unsubscribe always wins
- Rebuild your journeys by hand in the journey builder, starting from the welcome and post-visit starters
- Imported history shows on each guest's timeline but starts no journey, so nothing stale goes out
Questions
Can I use Engage as my main marketing platform?
Yes. Purple Engage brings guest data, email, SMS, WhatsApp, offers, forms, surveys, Meta ads, reviews and measurement into one platform. Run the work yourself, or let the AI team prepare it for a person to approve.
Can I use Engage alongside my current email tool?
Yes. Contacts and consent sync both ways with Mailchimp and HubSpot, and Engage segments can be sent to Mailchimp as audiences. An unsubscribe made in Mailchimp always wins and is never reversed by Engage.
What does Purple Engage cost?
You pay for what you send, not for who you know. Plans are priced on credits, the monthly usage unit: each email or WhatsApp message is one credit, each text is one credit per segment, and survey invitations, standalone offers and the AI you use draw credits too. Contacts are unlimited* on every plan, and the free plan is listed at 500 credits a month. Twilio also bills SMS and WhatsApp on your own account at Twilio's price, and Purple adds no markup.
Can I get my data out of Engage?
Yes. Export your guests by CSV, and the warehouse export sends contacts, activity, transactions, bookings and stays to your own BigQuery, Snowflake or Amazon S3 on a schedule, set up with the Purple team.
Is Purple Engage right for every business?
No. It fits best where guests walk in: multi-site pubs, restaurants, bars, hotels, leisure sites and retail, with guest data spread over several tools and lists big enough to measure (a campaign result needs 50 guests held back). It fits poorly if one site's till marketing already does the job, if you mainly need bookings, payments, points loyalty or wallet passes, if you sell only online, if you need single sign-on, SOC 2 or EU-only data residency from Engage itself, or if most of your texting is to the US.
Start with the data you already have
The free plan is listed at 500 credits a month, with unlimited* contacts and no card needed.