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Cordial, a cross-channel marketing and data management platform, today announced the closing of a $50 million Series C funding round led by NewSpring along with Upfront Ventures, High Alpha and new investor ABS Capital. Cordial CEO and founder Jeremy Swift said the fresh capital will be used to expand the company’s global footprint, launch new platform features and nearly double its headcount by the end of the year.
In Swift’s view, customers expect highly personalized messaging in exchange for the first-party data they share today. McKinsey agrees – according to the firm’s 2021 survey, 71% of consumers expect companies to provide personalized communications, and 76% are upset when they don’t. To meet expectations, marketers need to go beyond simply collecting data and be able to deliver a powerful message that wins and keeps customers, says Swift.
Another challenge is striking the right balance between deep reach and giving customers some breathing room. It is not easy. In a 2017 campaign survey, nearly half (49%) of consumers said they receive too many emails from business owners and marketers, and three in 10 want to hear from a brand once a month or less.
“Consumers aren’t scanning the same old, out-of-date messages from brands, or they’re not shopping the way they used to… Having all of your customer data available in real-time while you’re messaging — via email, SMS, mobile, social and more — has never been more important,” Swift said in an email interview. He told TechCrunch in an interview. “Legacy email service providers are trying to get businesses to leverage their lack of messaging and data capabilities, but they’re stockpiling point solutions that provide a congested user experience without real-time transaction execution capabilities. He said.
Swift co-founded Cordial in 2014 with Adam Gillespie, Chris McGreal and David Baker, seeing an opportunity to “inspire a more caring relationship” between brands and consumers. Gillespie and McGreal previously worked with Swift to develop BlueHornet, which was later acquired by Digital River.
“Our insight into the ESP market has paid huge dividends in anticipating what marketers want and what they will want in the future,” Swift said. “We believe there must be a better solution for marketers to engage their customers in personal and relevant ways.”
Cordial is the fruit of their labor by providing tools for marketing across channels including email, SMS and mobile applications. The platform aggregates data from multiple sources (e.g., cloud storage, rest APIs) to create AI models that automate campaigns, allowing marketers to match customers with known profiles for an improved customer experience.
Cordial central dashboard. Image Credits: Cordial
Cordial supports A/B testing, automatically updating messages to include better performing content aligned with KPIs such as revenue, gross margin and clicks. Out-of-the-box models try to predict everything from churn propensity (i.e., the likelihood of a customer leaving) to product affinity (i.e., the liking a customer has for a product), or users can build custom models and automated triggers based on them. on their business needs, rules and resources.
“Cordial has heavily emphasized and invested in machine learning across its platform, using models that can be customized for each customer,” Swift said. Customers can view or edit key predictions in each model to have a clear understanding of how Cordial’s machine learning works… We believe our customers should have full access and be able to easily understand how our models work to ensure reliable communication. And to avoid the “black box” approach of most broad-based general AI.
When asked who he sees as Cordial’s closest competitors, Swift named Breeze and Iterable — both of which deliver personalized, targeted marketing messages through channels including email and in-app notifications. But Swift competes to some extent with vendors like Amperity, which offers a product that pulls, cleans and reconciles customer data and then creates profiles available to other marketing systems.
Swift Asrest Cordial is carving out a niche for itself in the sprawling martech space, boasting over 600 clients including Revol, Backcountry and Purple. It estimates the total addressable market at $8 billion and says the latest round of funding will allow Cordial to capture a larger portion of it by “building new customer engagements.”
“Most technology leaders expect long, painful technology migration and adoption cycles, which is why they are often Cordial’s biggest advocates in the sales process, given the platform’s flexibility,” Swift said. “The Cordial platform, powered by the original CDP, can collect customer insights and business data from anywhere in their technology stack through real-time data feeds, integrating with any data source without changing patterns and structures. This data informs our marketing campaign approaches, native to audience segmentation, testing and content optimization. Allows them to use messaging tools.
Cordial currently has 130 employees and plans to grow to 200 by the end of the year, Swift said. The startup has raised $85 million in capital to date, benefiting in part from the recent boom in the martech and adtech industries.
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