Main Highlights
- Bluecore has secured $125 million in a Series E round of investment at a $1 billion valuation.
- The New York-based firm collaborates with hundreds of enterprise-level retailers such as Gap, Nike, Teleflora, Tommy Hilfiger, and CVS Pharmacy.
- Bluecore’s goal is to help businesses and brands to increase their recurring customer numbers.
- It tracks shoppers’ behavior, such as what they search for, click on, add to carts, abandon, and so on, and integrates it with in-store purchases and other data.
Bluecore, a marketing technology firm that assists some of the world’s largest retailers in “converting casual consumers into lifetime customers,” has secured $125 million in a Series E round of investment at a $1 billion valuation.
Bluecore was founded in 2013, and it assists direct-to-consumer (D2C) retailers in matching first-party shopper data with product engagements. The firm allows them to create tailored mass-marketing communications via email, e-commerce platforms, and other digital ad channels. The New York-based firm collaborates with hundreds of enterprise-level retailers such as Gap, Nike, Teleflora, Tommy Hilfiger, and CVS Pharmacy.
Retention of customers
Bluecore’s aims to answer the age-old issue of how businesses and brands can increase their recurring customer numbers.
“There are a variety of difficulties for retail, but when you peel back the layers and look at the core, the major issue is that 80 percent of customers only ever buy from a shop once,” said Bluecore CEO Fayez Mohamood. “This is especially problematic for business merchants, because the larger a shop becomes, the more the income potential that resides in retention.”
While all businesses desire loyal consumers, Mohamood contends that the stakes are higher for larger shops that have weathered the test of time and developed, such as Nike, Gap, Foot Locker, Lululemon, and Jockey.
“If you look at companies that have lasted, you will see that these are the ones that people continue to buy from,” Mohamood explained. “This isn’t by chance; they’ve made retention and consumer loyalty a major revenue growth strategy.”
Data is the new oil
Technology plays a critical role in assisting businesses not only “go digital,” but also grow by harnessing massive amounts of data. According to Mohamood, Bluecore is all about increasing income by increasing “purchase frequency, cart size, and conversions through personalization.” This entails combining real-time shopper and product data in a single system.
Bluecore tracks shopper behavior, such as what they search for, click on, add to carts, abandon, and so on, and integrates it with in-store purchases and other data. This results in the consolidation of different information into a single coherent picture that spans shopper identification and behavior as well as a product catalog.
“With this dataset, we can quickly automate activities across channels with the objective of always generating matches between each unique consumer and the items they’ll love,” Mahmood said.
Bluecore’s platform is divided into three parts: Bluecore Communicate, which automates personalized customer communications; Bluecore Advertise, which uses predictive modeling to target new and existing customer segments on paid media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads; and Bluecore Site, which uses predictive signals to deliver personalized marketing campaigns.
At the core of these goods is data, which has been regarded as today’s most precious resource – more valuable than oil — due to its importance in driving a wide range of business choices.
“When conventional shops go digital and digital companies expand, they must focus on customer retention as well as acquisition,” Mohamood added. “Fortunately, digital provides a data-rich environment for linking customers to the next-best offering that keeps them coming back for more.”
Bluecore had already raised around $113 million, and with an additional $125 million from investors including Georgian, FirstMark, Norwest, and Silver Lake Waterman, the firm claims it is now well-funded to engage in more e-commerce product development as well as AI and analytics.
More significantly, with a more specialized solution developed particularly for direct-to-consumer (D2C) merchants, Bluecore is better positioned to compete with traditional marketing clouds from Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce.
“We created our technology for the world of online shopping, and particularly for the unique use cases of retail, such as the requirement to encourage repeat purchases, protect margins, and lead customers through product discovery,” Mohamood explained.
Furthermore, the global pandemic was a key driver of digital change, with numerous conventional businesses forced to declare bankruptcy or downsize their brick-and-mortar presence.
“By 2020, the entire globe will have shifted to digital shopping,” Mohamood continued. “This was a big wake-up call for those multichannel, enterprise retailers that were still doing the majority of their sales in-store and didn’t consider their e-commerce sites to be key income generators.”
“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 e-commerce sites primary revenue generators.”