Name: CampaignUP

Legal Name: CampaignUP Ltd

Location: London, UK

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Ali Arslan

Website: https://www.campaignup.com/

Social Media: 80 Followers on Twitter, 51 Followers on LinkedIn

INDUSTRY – Mobile Marketing Technology

Size: $275.9M in 2018 (Source: Absolute Markets Insights)

Projections: $568.9M by 2024 (Source: Absolute Markets Insights)

The CampaignUP Story

Around 58% of the active internet users in the UK use WhatsApp as their primary messaging channel. At the same time, more 85% of WhatsApp users in the UK are aged 18–34, signifying a huge untapped opportunity for brands to leverage the platform to target the next generation of consumers – millennials and Gen Z. CampaignUP, a London-based startup is UK’s first-ever WhatsApp marketing solution helping brands build a customized interface to communicate with their customers. By enabling brands to send newsletters, targeted promotions, and one-on-one chats, the startup helps them engage and serve customers better and create additional value for them. 

I interviewed Ali Arslan, the Founder and CEO of CampaignUP to find out more about the platform and the company’s journey so far. 

Sharang: In your own words, how would you describe CampaignUP as a company? 

Ali: CampaignUP is a WhatsApp marketing solution that helps businesses use the messaging application as an effective tool for marketing, communication, and customer engagement. Think of it as a Mailchimp for WhatsApp, but without the spam. Using a platform like CampaignUP for WhatsApp-driven marketing communications, companies can potentially achieve an open rate that is 12 times compared to that with email. 

When CampaignUP started in 2018 there were no companies in the UK offering a WhatsApp marketing solution. Even now, the use of WhatsApp marketing is only gradually gaining pace. Our greatest challenge has been convincing companies to give WhatsApp marketing a try – something which they’ve never done or seen other people do before. 

Another challenge we have faced in our journey so far is that CampaignUP has not been included by WhatsApp as a registered Business Partner. While we are in the midst of discussions with WhatsApp on making this happen, it has nevertheless made our growth very challenging. 

Sharang: How do you differentiate yourself from other mobile marketing platforms or marketing SaaS startups? 

Ali: There are several companies offering text message automation or chatbot tools for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, email, and other instant messaging platforms. However, when we started in 2018 we were only the second in the world after the German company WhatsBroadcast which is now called MessengerPeople, and the first in the UK offering a WhatsApp marketing interface for businesses. 

CampaignUP is fully GDPR compliant and comes with a default ‘zero spam’ mechanism in order to stay ahead of the curve and ensure the privacy of consumers. What this means is that clients or brands offering a WhatsApp marketing channel cannot import mobile numbers into our system but instead, each and every subscriber has to send the first message to our clients’ WhatsApp channel. 

This also means that our customers have to build their WhatsApp database from scratch. It’s hard work, but worth it as everyone on the channel will have willingly registered their numbers and is genuinely interested in communicating with the brand. The users can unsubscribe anytime by texting “STOP”, and will no longer receive marketing content. The ‘zero spam’ mechanism on our platform will also make it capable of being used both as a marketing and CRM platform, and this differentiates us from the competition. 

Sharang: Does CampaignUP also offer segmentation features like other marketing automation platforms such as Mailchimp?

Ali: Yes, clients can build customer segments for WhatsApp marketing using CampaignUP and easily organize their subscribers into targeted lists. Using this feature, they can send relevant content, offers, newsletters, or updates in the form of media such as images, videos, gifs etc. to their subscribers across multiple targeted lists. Additionally, companies can also design automated responses to predefined question topics for faster resolution of customer queries. 

Further, the platform also integrates with Zendesk so clients can have visibility on their customers’ profiles and transaction histories. This enables brands to integrate their customer support functions and ensure a smoother customer journey. 

Ali Arslan was born in Turkey and moved to the UK to pursue his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at King’s College in London. A project management expert with a career spanning nearly two decades, Ali has worked across industries such as technology, e-commerce, marketing, and advertising. 

In April 2012, he founded a text marketing company called Esram Marketing Systems. The company built a proprietary technology platform to enable SMEs to create and run SMS campaigns, and sent over 4 million SMSes per annum through the platform. 

Sharang: What was the idea behind CampaignUP? Was there any specific trigger that led to its creation?

Ali: Before building CampaignUP, I founded and ran an SMS marketing business that was selling SMS credits to pizza shops in the UK. So I was already familiar with the use cases of text messaging as a channel for brand communications. 

The idea for CampaignUP came to me at the hospital my son James was born in, in June 2017. The UK general elections were underway and I was watching the results at the hospital ward. The Conservative Party had won the elections but surprisingly it was the Labour Party that had won the social media war. 

There were lots of negative statistics on how young people are just not interested in politics and were not using their vote. My ‘Eureka moment’ was when I realized that young people are more likely to engage with brands on WhatsApp than on SMS, given the number of young people who were using the former. Soon after, we hired a team to conduct market research for us outside Canary Wharf station and it was soon obvious that not just young people but a much larger number of people would be more likely to engage with their favorite brands using WhatsApp. 

Sharang: How has CampaignUP done so far? 

Ali: In 2017, I was introduced to The Conservative Party by Stephen Roberts, our mentor at Level39. It was because of the platform’s technology and privacy component that we were able to sign them on to help them with their voter outreach efforts. Subsequently, we also worked with clothing brand Select Fashion, a major fashion retailer with 160 high street stores across the UK. 

Currently, however, we are not onboarding any new clients until we become a WhatsApp Business Partner. In the meantime, our focus has been on incorporating the WhatsApp chat concept into new markets. For example, we’ve set-up weekly WhatsApp channels to send news pertaining to the communities in the UK, such as Italians (http://aggiornami.uk/), Turkish (http://nehaber.uk/), and Russians (https://www.vesti.uk/), wherein subscribers of these channels receive news directly on WhatsApp, sometimes with a podcast episode featuring successful entrepreneurs/artists from that community. 

Sharang: What are your plans for 2020? 

Ali: We have big plans for 2020. Based on our experience in the market so far, we have used our existing expertise and talent to build a new startup – Wishlist Alerts. In 2020, we’ll be focusing our efforts towards further building this platform. The concept is simple – users who are signed up on Wishlist Alerts will be notified via WhatsApp when an item they’ve added to their wishlist has reduced in price or is available cheaper elsewhere. 

The post CampaignUP – Enabling brands to reach digital consumers on WhatsApp appeared first on Techweek.

Legal Name: Gablex

Location: New York City, New York

Founded: 2019

Founder(s): Alex Sambvani and Gabriel Duncan

Website: https://gablex.ai/

Social Media: 14 Followers on LinkedIn

Industry – Enterprise AI Solutions

Size: $21.5B in 2018 (Source: Markets and Markets) 

Projections: $190.61B by 2025 (CAGR of 36.6%) (Source: Markets and Markets)

Introduction

Customer experience is a critical differentiator between enterprises today, and as a result, the need for smart and scalable solutions that help enterprises make this function more efficient is constantly increasing. Gablex has designed a solution to tap into just this need, with a special focus on small and medium enterprises. Its voice-first solution is designed to automate an enterprise’s repetitive tasks, allowing the company to expand beyond its human capabilities to be available and assist their customers quickly even beyond business hours.

The Product

Gablex’s solution uses the latest innovations in NLP (natural language processing) to provide solutions that enable automated conversations. The company has tailored its solutions to solve the most pressing use cases of each industry that it caters to. For instance, their solution for e-commerce enterprises automates taking orders over phones and processing of return orders. For beauty services, their solution focuses on automating the most repetitive task – appointment scheduling. And with all the data in the system, their solution also provides notifications, optimizations of schedules, and allows enterprises to perform targeted upselling. Gablex’s solution is available in the two most widely preferred channels – speech and text. A USP of the company’s solution is that their AI is self-learning, i.e. it is programmed to constantly learn from real conversations and become better, everyday.

Origin & Founding Team

Gablex has been jointly founded by Alex Sambvani & Gabriel Duncan. Before founding Gablex, the two worked together in Spotify’s Data Science team. Alex, the CEO of Gablex became interested in technology at a very early stage in his life when he learned to code at the age of 14. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, an MBA from Harvard Business School and has also worked in the private equity space at Credit Suisse. Gabriel, who heads technology for Gablex is a Columbia University alum with over 10 years of experience in data science and engineering for companies like Buzzfeed, NY Times and more.

Performance & Trends

Gablex launched in July 2019 and is currently providing solutions for six different industries – e-commerce, real estate, healthcare, restaurants, and beauty and wellness services. It is also one of the 10 companies shortlisted in the 2019 cohort of the Techstars NY chapter.

The post Gablex – Conversational AI platform for small and medium businesses appeared first on Techweek.

Name: Voyage

Legal Name: Voyage SMS, Inc

Location: Los Angeles, California

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Corey Epstein

Website: https://www.voyagetext.com/

Social Media Following: 119 Likes on Facebook, 28 Followers on LinkedIn 

INDUSTRY – Marketing Automation Software

Size: $5.10B in 2018 (Source: Mordor Intelligence)

Projections: $14.15B by 2024 (CAGR of 19.2%) (Source: Mordor Intelligence)

Introduction

Voyage SMS is a B2B SaaS company based in Los Angeles. They offer an automated text message marketing platform that enables e-commerce brands to more effectively leverage mobile marketing with SMS and MMS, providing significant ROAS and up to 10x revenues compared to email.

The Product 

Voyage is a mobile messaging solution that aims to be the MailChimp for SMS. Its proprietary text messaging platform helps e-commerce marketers maximize their revenue through text message-based mobile marketing. With Voyage, brands can build both short and long-term campaigns with automated messages for specific customer segments across their user journey. It offers custom solutions including but not limited to, initial opt-in list growth, automated drip campaigns, and weekend sales and promotions, which are aimed at helping clients achieve specific business goals. The platform also allows users to A/B test different copy for marketing messages to iteratively create the most impactful campaigns for their target audience. 

Voyage distinguishes itself from other bulk messaging platforms by bringing fresh functionalities to SMS that are more commonly seen in advanced email marketing automation platforms. The platform provides key performance metrics such as clicks, purchases, orders, revenue, etc. in real-time through its API integrations with commonly-used e-commerce tools, such as Shopify and ReCharge. Brands can use Voyage to segment their audience based on their buying behavior and engagement and create a customized communication experience to maximize conversions. They can also automate drip & one-time campaign messages to upsell products to existing customers, inform them about new product launches, offer discounts and promotions, or recover abandoned carts.

Voyage is also compatible with multichannel marketing and can be integrated with many other platforms (such as Klaviyo) so that marketers can use email for more visual content and text messaging for more time-sensitive communication. The combination of both email and SMS, therefore, allows for more effective engagement since text messaging delivers up to a 40%+ CTR, which is 5-10x better than email marketing.

Origin and Founding Team 

Corey Epstein, Founder and CEO of Voyage SMS, is a serial entrepreneur with interests across areas such as digital media, marketing, fashion, music, and brand building. In 2012, he founded DSTLD, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) fashion brand and spent over seven years overseeing the brand’s evolution with digital marketing and mobile communications. Between 2012 and 2017, the brand grew to achieve $3M in sales, which tripled soon following an equity crowdfunding round in early 2018 that enabled the company to scale up. During this period, Corey also witnessed the rise of text messaging as a marketing channel, and noticed that brands using it were seeing 4 times the engagement with SMS as compared to email.

Speaking about Voyage, Corey said, “While building DSTLD, we used several email marketing solutions and noticed a number of gaps in their functionality. They either did not have very detailed reporting features or could not be integrated with other channels. Simultaneously, the mobile consumer base for digital and e-commerce brands was growing steadily and e-mail no longer had the kind of impact that text messages did. So we set about building an automated platform that would allow businesses to leverage SMS in a similar manner as any email marketing software, but with more effective targeting and engagement capabilities. With Voyage, we focused considerably on the design and user experience to make the platform as simple as possible for businesses and allow them to derive maximum value from it.” 

Performance and Trends

Since it began operations in October 2018, Voyage has worked with several e-commerce startups and growth-stage businesses to improve their SMS marketing. It works with one-time purchase businesses as well as subscription-based businesses having revenues ranging from $5M to $150M.

Voyage’s clients include e-commerce brands with million-dollar-plus revenue such as Ruggable, a company manufacturing machine-washable rugs; Winc, a wine-in-a-box subscription brand; Dr. Squatch, a company offering all-natural, handmade soaps for men; and 12th Tribe, a women’s fashion e-commerce brand. 

In terms of the platform’s performance, Voyage recently helped a client generate $360K from a 4-day sale through SMS, representing 30% of the revenue their website generated during that period. An optimized message built on the Voyage dashboard and guided by insights from the dashboard gave a return of $6.55 per message, which is significantly higher than the average revenue per recipient of $0.08 from email campaigns, as per recent data from Klaviyo.

The post Voyage SMS – Text marketing platform for e-commerce business growth appeared first on Techweek.