Loyalty automation platform Glue right now raked in $eight million in series A funding from private investors led by Unicorn Technologies. The startup says that the proceeds will be place toward nudging regional corporations to adopt loyalty applications.
Retail has taken a main hit for the duration of the pandemic. Total sales are anticipated to hit five.7% from 2019, almost 12% beneath eMarketer’s pre-pandemic estimate of $26 trillion. Some information suggests that loyalty applications could assist lessen future blows. According to Accenture, loyalty system membership in the U.S. grew at a price of 26.7% from 2012 to 2014. And one particular current survey located that 50% of shoppers say their major purpose for joining a loyalty system is to earn rewards on purchases.
Glue provides a platform that attempts to gauge loyalty and facilitate the improvement of each day, weekly, and month-to-month engagement plans. It self-runs rewards, coupons, and points systems and gives tools for loyalty and sales development evaluation and reporting. Glue provides obtain and behavior tracking for buyer targeting and tailors reward tiers to person corporations it can import information from current buyer connection management application and allow shoppers to register for loyalty applications on their smartphones.
“Glue started as an app creator called Bobile. At the time, we thought every business needs an app, but after a while, we understood what’s really important to the business owners we spoke with is the ability to keep their customers coming back,” Glue CEO Ira Nachtigal, who cofounded Glue with Jacob Tenenboim and Dany Gal, told VentureBeat by means of e mail. “But, they are busy. Most local businesses don’t have the time, the knowledge, or the resources to manage it. Loyalty, when done right, is complex, so we decided not to create yet another loyalty tool, but rather to do the work for them.”
Glue supports loyalty approaches such as points-earning systems, coupons, loyalty cards, subscriptions, prepaid multi-passes, and play-to-win games. Customers can use it to schedule vacation and specific occasions greetings, launch Google Ads development campaigns, or encourage stroll-ins with geofencing campaigns.
After finishing a 15-minute onboarding questionnaire on Glue’s web-site, enterprise owners get a branded members club and a projection of savings. Glue claims its applications are customized by leveraging businesses’ buyer information and pairing them with information points from one hundred,000 organizations, resulting in what the corporation calls an typical savings of involving $15,000 to $20,000 per tiny enterprise and substantial income development.
“Glue collects the data from thousands of businesses around the world, analyzes the consumer behavior and optimizes the loyalty strategy that is built for every business,” Nachtigal explained. “For example, let’s say you own a coffee house in Boston. Glue already has a lot of information and accumulated knowledge about coffee shops and their consumers in the east coast. Using AI Glue knows what is most likely to work for your coffee house and your customers and given your specific price range, will be able to tailor a successful loyalty strategy for your coffee house.”
Glue has a quantity of competitors in the space. There’s AppCard, a mobile-initially loyalty advertising and marketing system for tiny and medium-size retailers, as nicely as Punchh, a startup leveraging machine mastering and omnichannel integrations to make buyer journeys. Just final year, Drop, a coalition buyer loyalty corporation headquartered in Toronto, raised $44 million. That’s all to say that 15-employee Glue will have to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack, but this most current funding round — and its increasing quantity of coffee shop, cosmetic, pet shop, service provider, and auto repair shop shoppers — suggests that it is had results in that respect.