Optimove, a leading CRM marketing platform, announced today it has acquired Graphyte, a real-time, cloud-based personalization platform optimizing the web and mobile experience for consumers. The announcement comes on the heels of Optimove’s purchase of Kumulos, a leading provider of a personalized messaging platform for mobile applications. The combined purchase price of the two deals was not disclosed. The acquisitions help bolster Optimove as one of the most comprehensive CRM marketing platforms. Its AI-driven solutions autonomously determine the next-best-action for each customer, eliminating the need for marketers to manually map every customer journey.
With the new capabilities added to the Optimove platform, for the first time, marketers can deeply personalize every customer touchpoint, empowered by Optimove’s hallmark capability of transforming customer data into customer-led journeys at scale. Optimove’s Customer Data Platform unifies all customer data from all sources to create a comprehensive single customer view. Graphyte adds real-time content recommendations across any channel and touchpoint. Kumulos bolstered Optimove’s journey orchestration engine, adding native mobile capabilities to allow brands to seamlessly orchestrate multichannel marketing journeys across the web, email, and mobile channels. The result is a one-stop, full-service multichannel marketing hub built for personalization at scale.
The new joint offering builds upon Optimove’s ability to eliminate marketing misfires in cross-channel communication with customers to ensure the most relevant and the most personalized message reaches customers. It is helping marketers increase customer loyalty, retention, and lifetime value.
Newly acquired London-based Graphyte provides a real-time, cloud-based personalization platform for customer relationship programs and campaigns. The platform delivers improved conversion rates, click-through rates, and revenue uplift by leveraging personalized recommendations across channels. For example, Gala Bingo has driven a 35% turnover uplift using Graphyte’s web personalization models and seen a 300% increase in site visits when providing intelligent recommendations in emails instead of traditional static emails.
Graphyte delivers improved business results because its platform enables marketers to serve personalized content recommendations and dynamically adapt their web, native mobile sites, and mobile apps to engage customers effectively. Graphyte provides over 20 different AI models that, unlike other personalization engines, empower marketers with complete control over how recommendations are made when testing and deploying personalized treatments, without needing to make any changes to the core CMS. Furthermore, personalized recommendations can seamlessly be embedded in outbound digital channels.
Pini Yakuel, CEO and Founder of Optimove, said, “With the addition of Graphyte, marketers can transform their customer data into personalized customer-led journeys at scale. Our platform seamlessly delivers real-time symmetric messaging across any channel and touchpoint. The Graphyte acquisition was a natural next step in our evolution. It is part of Optimove’s relentless journey of empowering marketers to optimize customer data into deeper relationships, incremental sales, and loyalty at scale. The winner in these acquisitions is our clients and their customers.”
Said Damien Evans, CEO of Graphyte. “Optimove’s CRM Marketing capabilities are second to none. Our goal has always been to create unprecedented freedom for brands to realize their CRM marketing visions. We are confident that our machine learning personalization models, combined with Optimove, will enable brands to connect with their customers intelligently. We couldn’t be happier to join forces with Optimove as an integral part of their offering.”
Said Bob Lawson, co-founder of Kumulos, who is now Director of Mobile Offering at Optimove, “Kumulos has brought a unique blend of mobile messaging and engagement capabilities, such as geo-fencing and deferred deep linking, to enable personalized mobile-first experiences for brands. Marketers are already building mobile campaigns and journeys within Optimove.”
A recent Forrester report underscored Optimove’s evolution. The report entitled, The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (Independent Platforms), noted, “Optimove transforms from CDP (customer data platform) to full-fledged CCCM (cross-channel campaign management) solution. Optimove leverages its CDP as a foundation for personalized customer-led journeys aligned with business key performance indicators (KPIs).”
Yakuel added, “If you think about marketers when they engage with their customers, it doesn’t matter if they do it in one channel or another. It doesn’t matter if they do it with a small amount of data or a lot. They want customer data to guide them properly in developing the best ideas and communication strategies. And they want symmetric communication across all the channels. Ultimately, that’s what we’re doing with these acquisitions – pushing the CRM industry forward while making sure marketers leverage customer data for value. Realizing the full value of customer data is a never-ending mission,” he concluded.
With the acquisitions of Graphyte and Kumulos, marketers using Optimove are now empowered with the following:
- Symmetric multichannel journeys: Symmetry ends cross-firing messages that can confuse or alienate a brand’s customers. It ensures customers view the same personalized recommendations in outbound campaigns when clicking through to the brand’s website or mobile app. It is enabled when marketers leverage Graphyte’s real-time, cloud-based personalization platform and Optimove’s multichannel marketing platform.
- Geolocation-triggered personalized recommendations: An example of geolocation is triggering relevant product recommendations when customers walk into a retailer’s store. Marketers now have the power to meet the customer in the moment by maximizing Graphyte’s product recommendation relevancy, leveraging past-purchase behavior from tens of thousands of customers, and combining it with Kumulos’ geo-fencing technology to trigger personalized messages to customers’ mobile apps.
- True 1-to-1 personalization: 1-to-1 personalization means the ability to overlay powerful AI-based models with historical customer data, such as customers’ loyalty tiers or RFM attributes. Marketers can now achieve this by selecting one of Graphyte’s 20 distinct, open AI models to personalize player experiences based on robust segmentation from Optimove’s Customer Data Platform.
Joint customers will benefit from synergies which will see Graphyte’s models enriched with robust data from Optimove’s CDP. At the same time, the models’ results will be readily accessible within customer profiles inside Optimove for segmentation, activation, and analysis. Joint customers will soon be able to reap these benefits and more.
Separately, Optimove announced in September 2021 that it raised $75 million in funding to accelerate its platform development through M&A and strategic hiring, already increasing its workforce to 370 employees.
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