Executing cross-channel marketing campaigns isn’t easy no matter what resources a brand has at its disposal. According to a recent survey, only 30% of marketers are highly confident in their ability to deliver a mulichannel strategy, followed by 67% who are only somewhat confident. Be that as it may, 95% of salespeople say they consider multichannel marketing important for customer targeting, which is likely why an estimated 51% of companies use at least eight channels to interact with customers.
That’s why Andrew Boni (who worked at Google on AdSense) and Justin Zhu (who built user growth systems at Twitter) cofounded Iterable, a startup developing a platform that enables brands to create, execute, and optimize cross-channel campaigns with flexibility. Roughly six years after the launch of its first product, the San Francisco-based company today announced that it has raised $60 million in series D funding led by Viking Global Investors, with participation from Index Ventures, CRV, Blue Cloud Ventures, Harmony Partners, and Stereo Capital.
The cash infusion — which brings Iterable’s total raised to over $140 million — comes shortly after Iterable opened offices in London and Denver. CEO Zhu says it will fund the expansion of its headcount to 400 employees by year-end 2020.
Iterable’s tools tap machine learning algorithms to analyze users’ behavior and optimize the time, channel, and frequency to engage them. The tools automatically suss out the best time for conversion — gleaned through event data — and designate the channels users are most likely to convert in. Plus, they leverage real-time interaction data to cap messaging volume in order to avoid fatiguing users with promotions.
From within Iterable’s control panel, marketing mangers can orchestrate welcome campaigns and trials, targeted sales, promotions, and product updates across mail, mobile push, SMS, in-app, web push, and direct mail channels. They’re able to deploy cart abandonment flows to drive more checkouts, and to define rules-based triggers that kick off post-purchase, as well as renewal sequences and more. Furthermore, using Iterable’s Workflow Studio component, users can build cross-channel segments with drag-and-drop filters and delay schedulers.
An analytics component — Iterable Insights — lets clients drill down into real-time user, behavioral, and event data from up to millions of users, and measure and fine-tune campaigns with an on-demand experimentation and A/B testing tool. Customers can be dynamically segmented and their preferences stored, thanks to support for profiles spanning hundreds of demographic and custom event data fields. And APIs and universal webhooks enable the retrieval of information from third- and first-party sources at scale.
The global omnichannel retail commerce platform market is expected to grow from $2.99 billion in 2017 to $11.01 billion by 2023, and Iterable isn’t the only firm vying for a slice of it. There’s 6sense, which in April raised $27 million for its cloud-hosted marketing and sales predictive analytics tools. There’s also Kustomer, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider that automates repetitive processes by applying analytics atop data from multiple sources; RedPoint, which offers products that analyze customer data with AI; and Punchh, a startup leveraging machine learning and omnichannel integrations to create customer journeys.
But despite the fierceness of the competition, Iterable has made a name for itself, attracting heavy-hitting customers like AT&T, Box, DoorDash, ShopRunner, FabFitFun, SeatGeek, and Zillow. In another show of strength, this latest fundraising round is the company’s second in less than 12 months. (Iterable previously nabbed $50 million in a series C that closed in March 2019.)
Author: Kyle Wiggers
Source: Venturebeat
