email marketing
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Cordial raises $15M for smarter emails and messaging
Cordial, a San Diego startup building what CEO Jeremy Swift described as a “truly next-generation platform” for email marketing, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
Swift and his co-founders come from email marketing company BlueHornet/Mapp Digital, which he said gave them the background to see “the market was really screaming: There needs to be a better way.”
We’ve written about plenty of other email marketing products. For example, last week I covered Stensul, which focuses on the email creation process. But Swift argued that most startups are building “point solutions” that sit on top of existing email platforms, whereas Cordial is “unequivocally” taking on the big marketing clouds offered by Oracle, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce.
“Cordial has gone to market to say you don’t need a legacy solution, plus a whole host of other point solutions, to try and do real-time messaging in a better way,” he said.
When Swift and Sales Engineering Manager Justin Soni gave me a quick demo of the Cordial platform, one of the big distinctions they pointed to was the way it uses customer data. Rather than targeting and customizing emails based on broad customer segments, they showed me how a Cordial email can incorporate dynamic elements that are updated with real-time, personal data — as Soni clicked around on different products on the merchant website, the email he was creating changed based on that behavior.
In addition, Cordial applies machine learning technology to optimize the emails — not just testing out variations on one element, but every part of the email, from the subject line to the call-to-action button.
And while Cordial started out with email, Swift said it’s expanded to include other messaging channels like push notifications and SMS. All of that can be coordinated from within a tool called Podium, where a marketer uses a visual interface to build different communication flows based on customer actions.
Cordial previously raised $6 million in Series A funding. Companies using the platform include Freshly, La Quinta and 1-800-Contacts.
The new funding was led by PeakSpan, with participation from Upfront Ventures and High Alpha. Swift said this will allow Cordial to continue adding new marketing channels (the goal is one per quarter) and to continue investing in the technology.
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Movable Ink now lets developers build custom email applets
Movable Ink has always prided itself on providing marketers with a way to deliver highly customized emails, but today the company decided to take that one step further. It announced an SDK that enables developers to build custom applets to add their own unique information to any email.
The company has always seen itself as a platform on which marketers can build these highly customized email marketing campaigns, says Bridget Bidlack SVP of product at Movable Ink .
“We built our business on making it easier for marketers to add intelligent content into any email campaign through a library of hundreds of apps. With our [latest] launch, we’re really opening up our development framework to agencies and system integrators so that they can create those apps on their own,” Bidlack explained.
This means companies are free to create any type of data integration they wish and not simply rely on Movable Ink to supply it for them. Bidlack says that could be anything from the current weather to accurate inventory levels, loyalty point scores and recent purchase activity.
What’s more, Movable Ink doesn’t really care about the source of the data. It could come from the company CRM system, internal database or offer management tool. Bidlack says Movable Ink can incorporate that data into an email regardless of where it’s stored.
This all matters because the company’s whole raison d’etre is about providing a customized email experience for every user. Instead of getting a generic email marketing campaign, you would get something that pulls in details from a variety of sources inside the company to build a custom email aimed directly at the individual recipient.
Company co-founder and CEO Vivek Sharma says that when they launched in 2010, service providers at the time were focused on how many people they could reach and open rate, but nobody was really thinking about the content. His company wanted to fill that gap by focusing specifically on building emails with customized content.
As Sharma said, they didn’t try to take on the email service providers. Instead they wanted to build this intelligent customization layer on top. They have grown increasingly sophisticated with their approach in the last 8 years and count companies like Dunkin’ Donuts, Bloomingdale’s, Comcast and Delta among their 500+ customers. They also have strategic partnerships with companies in the space like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, Cheetah Digital, Epsilon and many others.
The approach seems to be working. The company has raised a modest $14 million since it launched in 2010, but today it boasts $40 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Sharma.
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Microsoft launches new email marketing and invoicing tools for small businesses
In the shadow of its Inspire partner conference, Microsoft today launched in preview three new tools for small businesses: Microsoft Connections, Microsoft Listings and Microsoft Invoicing. These join the company’s existing stable of small business tools like Microsoft Bookings and the Outlook Customer Manager. Microsoft Connections allows its users to create Mailchimp-like email… Read More
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Rebelmail rebrands as Rebel and adds one-click checkout to its interactive email platform
Rebel has been helping marketers do more with their emails — so that those emails become interactive experiences (with capabilities like galleries and quizzes) in and of themselves. Now the startup is adding the ability for consumers to complete their purchase from an email. Read More
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Conversica lands $34 million Series B to build intelligent sales assistants
After a potential customer has first contact with a business, sales gets in gear, often responding with an introductory email. Conversica has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to automate these early contact emails, and pass it off to a human salesperson when the time is right. Today, it announced a $30 million investment.
The round was led by Providence Strategic Growth. Read More
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Rebelmail launches an API to bring more interactivity to emails
Rebelmail is now making its interactive email capabilities available through an API, allowing developers to take advantage of the technology and incorporate it into other applications.
The startup works with customers Airbnb, Casper and HP to help them include things like photo galleries, quizzes and purchasing capabilities in their emails — and make sure the experience works across… Read More
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Weebly expands beyond easy-to-build websites, adds easy-to-build marketing emails
Weebly isn’t just for building websites anymore — it recently launched Promote, a platform for building marketing emails. CEO David Rusenko said this is actually Weebly’s second big expansion, after adding an e-commerce platform. But at least e-commerce is, y’know, part of a website. Why move into emails? “Email marketing is the number two concern for small… Read More
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Automated Copywriting Startup Persado Raises $21M
Persado, a startup that says it can automatically create and test different marketing emails and other promotional material, is announcing that it has raised $21 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Alex Vratskides told me that the automated approach allows marketers to try out many more versions of a message than they’d get with regular A/B testing (where human copywriters… Read More
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