The Sailthru Customer Retention Cloudsm enables retail and media brands to drive profitable growth through cross-channel personalization, automation and analytics; Carnival Mobile Marketing Suite integration extends Sailthru services to meet growing market needs for advanced mobile personalization and automation
NEW YORK – Sailthru, the leading Customer Retention Cloudsm for the world’s top retail and media companies, announced that it has acquired Carnival.io, a mobile marketing automation platform for global brands. With the Carnival integration, Sailthru further solidifies its position as the only marketing technology delivering cross-channel personalization, automation and analytics based on a single customer profile. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
.@Sailthru acquires @Carnivalio, gives cross-channel personalization/automation to brands like @JustFab, @TaskRabbit
Carnival, whose customers include Coca-Cola, Penguin Random House and Air New Zealand, has grown annual recurring revenue more than 300 percent since the beginning of 2015 and increased its customer base 250 percent in the same period. Carnival’s Mobile Marketing Suite includes push notifications; in-app messaging; a rich customizable message center which allows marketers to automate messages by customer behavior, location and demographic data; and mobile analytics. In 2015, Waracle, a UK-based mobile app development and marketing agency, rated Carnival as the top provider for push notifications.
Nearly 50 percent of Sailthru’s retail and media clients offer native applications and will immediately benefit from the mobile expertise of the Carnival team as well as the automation capabilities of its software solutions. One of Sailthru’s key differentiators over legacy marketing clouds and point solutions is its use of comprehensive, individual customer profiles that combine email, web, mobile, social and offline behavioral and interest data. Decisions made by Sailthru’s Personalization Engine use these multichannel profiles – drawing upon the complete history of customer data, rather than the most recent 30 days of data as often seen with legacy platforms – to deliver highly relevant experiences and improve customer lifetime value.
“Mobile devices have become embedded in our daily lives and marketers need an easy way to tap into this dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Mobile cannot be treated as another channel; it is not an island. Until this point, moving beyond siloed data sets and simple triggered mobile messages has not been easy. Marketers simply have not had the technology needed to deliver a truly relevant, cross-channel experience,” said Neil Lustig, CEO, Sailthru. “Sailthru’s mission is to help marketers build deeper, longer-lasting relationships with their customers. We believe that human connections matter more than ever before, and in Carnival, we’ve found a complementary company that delivers on this vision.”
Sailthru manages more than 1.7 billion unique worldwide customer profiles. With data from all channels existing in a single profile, retail and media marketers can deliver a seamless, cross-channel experience to every individual customer and reader. Through the acquisition of and integration with Carnival, mobile engagements will be informed by these multichannel profiles.
“Mobile is more than a channel. It connects multiple aspects of the customer experience within email, web, app and even in-store. Retailers are looking to create the best experience on mobile possible, but the technologies available for marketers are limited,” said Monica Deretich, Director of Marketing & CRM at JustFab, the leading fashion-subscription e-commerce site. “Sailthru continues to impress me as a team and through the technology they continuously deliver. At JustFab, we pride ourselves on offering an entirely personalized experience for our members from the moment they engage with our site. Sailthru shares this ideology and continues to innovate so that we are able to deliver a meaningful experience. Sailthru’s existing retention solution has driven significant increases in revenue for both our first-time and repeat purchasers. I look forward to seeing how the addition of mobile marketing automation allows them to further solidify their position as an all-encompassing modern marketing cloud.”
In a Gartner report, Mobile Marketing Primer for 20161, it states: “a major contribution that mobile makes to the larger marketing operation is as the conduit or complement to other channels, such as email, search marketing, social marketing and digital commerce.” The report further adds, “cross-device identification tools to identify customers on the different devices they use, as well as location and proximity marketing approaches require a flexible and varied set of analytics to fully exploit the mobile marketing opportunity to contribute to all stages of a purchase process. Marketers must rise to the challenge of exploiting mobile’s ability to link to and activate the engagement points controlled by peers in multichannel, social, email and Web marketing teams.”
“Our customers – and really all modern consumers – expect mobile experiences to be simple, relevant, and seamless all while occurring in real time,” said Rob Willey, Vice President of Marketing at TaskRabbit, the on-demand services marketplace. “We know that having access to a suite of tools that enables us to connect mobile to our total marketing ecosystem is critical for success, both today and in the future, as consumers and mobile marketing continue to evolve. As a technology partner, Sailthru has enabled us to better understand our customers and gain a clear understanding of what the future of our marketing plan should look like. I expect their acquisition of a mobile marketing automation platform to further enhance the value they provide retailers, publishers and marketplaces.”
Sailthru was founded in 2008. Revenues have increased 300 percent over the last three years and in 2015 the company ranked number 88 on Deloitte’s 2015 Technology Fast 500tm.
“Sailthru and Carnival share a commitment to improving retention and the long-term value of relationships between brands and customers,” said Guy Horrocks, CEO, Carnival. “Both of our businesses are built for modern marketers: with Sailthru, you have an extremely powerful engine able to provide true personalization at scale. At Carnival we share this vision and have built an intuitive mobile platform for marketers. By making it extremely easy-to-use, we save marketers time and increase their opportunities for success in the rapidly evolving mobile landscape. I’m excited to see what we can bring to market together as mobile becomes an even greater priority for every retail and media brand.”
Prior to today’s acquisition Carnival has raised $2.4M in venture funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Gary Vaynerchuk, Google Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Bowery Capital, Box Group, Jos White and Mike Lazerow.
About Sailthru
The Sailthru Customer Retention Cloudsm helps modern marketers at leading retail and media companies build deeper, longer-lasting relationships with their customers. Sailthru personalizes individual customer experiences across digital communication channels – in email, on a brand’s website and in their mobile applications. Sailthru-powered 1:1 relationships with consumers help drive higher revenue, improve customer lifetime value and reduce churn for the world’s most innovative publishers, including The Economist, Business Insider, and Mashable, and the world’s fastest growing ecommerce companies, including Rent The Runway, JustFab, and Alex and Ani. Founded in 2008, Sailthru is headquartered in NYC, and backed by an exceptional group of investors, including Benchmark, RRE Ventures, DFJ Gotham, Scale Venture Partners, and AOL Ventures.
For more information, please visit www.sailthru.com.
About Carnival.io
Carnival.io provides a mobile marketing automation platform for global brands to engage and manage their mobile app audiences through personalized messaging. Carnival transforms apps with rich push notifications, in-app messages, and a customizable message center; enabling Fortune 500 brands to increase engagement, conversion and retention. Carnival launched its platform in 2013, and powers mobile messaging for innovative brands including Mondelēz, Air New Zealand, Coca-Cola, AMPM, Penguin Random House, and Les Mills.
For more information please visit: Carnival.io
1 Gartner, Mobile Marketing Primer for 2016, Adam Sarner, Mike McGuire, Charles S. Golvin. 25 January 2016
