How Blueshift is enabling marketers to automate individualize messages The combination of big data and machine learning delivers Rocket Science as a Service to marketers
By Samiksha Jain •
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Today, consumers are inundated with e-mails, push notifications and text messages that contain marketing and product information but lack personal relevance to them.
Blueshift, the leader in Segment-of-One marketing automation for B2C companies, aims to solve this pain-point by allowing marketers to individually tailor their messages to their customers based on shoppers' interests, purchase patterns and browsing behavior.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs with backgrounds at successful companies such as Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs) and Mertado, Blueshift's Segment-of-One marketing automation solutions, are powered by an Interaction Graph that stores each user's stream of interactions with products or content.
The graph is continually enhanced with additional attributes, including affinity scores, e-mail and push notification engagement data and more. With the multi-channel capabilities of Blueshift, customers can scale to multiple messaging channels, including e-mail, mobile push notifications and SMS.
Through a combination of big data and machine learning, startup is applying the latest innovations in artificial intelligence to make digital marketing smarter, better and more relevant: Rocket Science as a Service (RSaas).
San Francisco-based startup enables marketers to segment customers based on behavior, predictive scores, affinity, catalog attributes, lifecycle, demographics, response to messages, traffic sources and more. Customers can then choose a variety of merchandising techniques to boost response, including collaborative filtering, affinity based content, retargeting, trending content, content updates and user and event attributes.
Funding
Nexus backed, Blueshift, has added another feather in his cap. It has recently raised $8.0 million in Series A round of venture financing led by Storm Ventures. Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. Anshu Sharma of Storm has joined the Blueshift board of directors, bringing to the company his many years of experience in SaaS from his executive leadership role at industry leader Salesforce.com.
Commenting on the investment, Anshu Sharma, Partner, Storm Venture Partners, said, "Blueshift has built a unique segment of one marketing platform by leveraging the very latest innovations in big data and machine learning—built by a team of seasoned marketing practitioners. We think this is the future of all marketing automation."
The venture plans to utilize this capital to accelerate sales and marketing and to continue building out its proprietary Interaction Graph™ platform.
Entrepreneur's take
With growing Internet and smartphone penetration in both urban and rural parts of the country, online marketers will enjoy their share of pie. If we go by the report of Mintigo (2014), it states that industries such as telecommunications, computer and electronics, health and business services are those that adopt the highest rate of marketing automation.
Now, we have to see how Blueshift will tap this untapped market with this round of funding and having expertise of Anshu Sharma who has come up as their new board member.
