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Bluecore, a advertising technologies corporation that aids some of world’s most significant retailers “transform casual shoppers into lifetime customers,” has raised $125 million in a series E round of funding at a $1 billion valuation.
Founded in 2013, Bluecore aids direct-to-customer (D2C) retailers match initial-party shopper information with solution interactions, enabling them to style customized mass-advertising communications by means of e-mail, ecommerce platforms, and other digital ad channels. The New York-based corporation operates with hundreds of enterprise-grade retailers, like Gap, Nike, Teleflora, Tommy Hilfiger, and CVS Pharmacy.
Retention
The difficulty that Bluecore is setting out to resolve is the age-old conundrum of how firms and brands can boost their repeat custom metrics. Retention, in the end, is the name of the game.
“There are a number of challenges for retail, but if you peel back the layers and look at the core, the primary issue is that 80% of customers only ever buy from a retailer once,” Bluecore CEO Fayez Mohamood told VentureBeat. “This is particularly an issue for enterprise retailers, because the larger a retailer gets, the larger the revenue potential that lies in retention is.”
While retailers of all sizes naturally want loyal clients, Mohamood argues that the stakes are larger for bigger ones such as Nike, Gap, Foot Locker, Lululemon, and Jockey — brands that have stood the test of time and evolved.
“If you look at brands that have endured, you’ll realize that they’re the ones that people keep buying from,” Mohamood stated. “This isn’t random — they’ve made retention and shopper loyalty a key strategy for revenue growth.”
Data: the new oil
Technology plays a significant part in assisting firms not only “go digital,” but scale by means of leveraging vast swathes of information. That is what Bluecore is all about — driving income by increasing “purchase frequency, cart size, and conversions through personalization,” according to Mohamood, which includes meshing true-time shopper information with solution information in a single program.
Bluecore captures shopper activity such as what they’re browsing for, clicking on, adding to carts, abandoning, and so on, and combines this with other information such as in-retailer transactions. This culminates in the amalgamation of disparate information sets into a single unified view spanning shopper identity shopper behavior and solution catalog.
“Using this data set, we can immediately automate actions across channels with the goal of continuously creating matches between each individual shoppers and the products they’ll love,” Mahmood stated.
Bluecore’s platform constitutes 3 principal components: Bluecore Communicate, which is concerned with automating customized consumer communications Bluecore Advertise, which makes use of predictive modelling to target each new and current consumer segments on paid media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads and Bluecore Site, which makes use of predictive signals to provide customized advertising campaigns.
At the heart of these items is information, which has typically been described as the world’s most precious resource today — more so than oil — offered the part it plays in driving all manner of small business choices.
“When traditional retailers go digital and digital brands scale, they have to focus as much on customer retention as acquisition,” Mohamood continued. “Fortunately, digital offers a data-rich environment for connecting shoppers to the next-best product that gets them to buy again and again.”
Show me the revenue
Prior to now, Bluecore had raised about $113 million, and with yet another $125 million in the bank from investors like Georgian, FirstMark, Norwest, and Silver Lake Waterman, the corporation stated it is now effectively-financed to invest in additional ecommerce solution development and in AI and analytics.
More importantly, Bluecore is also greater positioned to challenge legacy advertising clouds from the likes of Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce with a more targeted supplying constructed especially for direct-to-customer (D2C) retailers.
“We built our technology for the world of online shopping — and more specifically, for the unique use cases of retail, such as the need to create repeat purchases, preserve margins and guide shoppers through product discovery,” Mohamood stated.
Moreover, the worldwide pandemic was a significant driver of digital transformation, with numerous regular retailers forced into bankruptcy or downsizing their brick-and-mortar presence — it is all about ecommerce now.
“In 2020, the whole world moved to digital shopping,” Mohamood added. “This was a major wake-up call to those omnichannel, enterprise retailers who still did the majority of their sales in-store and didn’t consider their ecommerce sites primary revenue generators.”