By Cassandra Balentine
Bluecore is an ecommerce solution that enables marketers to create and distribute personalized, triggered emails with speed and precision not previously possible. The solution enables users to dynamically react to changes in customer and catalog behaviors in a matter of seconds.
Formerly known as TriggerMail, Bluecore is a privately-held start up based in New York, NY. Established in March of 2013, the company recently closed a Series A round led by FirstMark Captial. As of January 2015, the company employed a staff of more than 30 employees and works with over 50 customers representing more than 85 brands.
The company strives to deliver customer engagement and conversion at rates that defy industry standards.
Core Solution
The Bluecore platform addresses a critical pain point for marketers, which is integration. According to the company, traditionally marketers spend days pulling together data from a variety of sources, including ecommerce platforms, analytics engines, recommendations systems, and email service providers (ESPs) to set up a few automated emails.
According to Fayez Mohamoud, co-founder/CEO, Bluecore, the solution differentiates itself from competition by providing a different approach to email marketing. “Legacy solutions talk about things like the ‘customer journey.’ Some companies even hire customer journey officers. The flaw here is they’re trying to solve challenges for the end user while the folks trying to implement these programs are suffering,” he comments. “So in a sense Bluecore starts with the marketer’s journey. The Bluecore solution begins with the marketer to fix their workflow, and only then, focuses on the output. We eliminate the need for collaboration between an ESP, data analytics, recommendation engine, etc., just to target and deliver a triggered email. We eliminate this time-sucking alignment of the enterprise stack with a single line of code.”
Additionally, Bluecore’s behavioral triggers enable marketers to reach customers based on the behaviors of the end user as well as the product catalog. “We’re delivering triggers like window shopping, price drops, and new product inventory that simply can’t be done with any other solution on the market,” adds Mohamoud. These triggers are designed to be more personal and timely, driving conversion numbers that defy industry standards.
Finally, marketers using Bluecore have greater flexibility and support to test and experiment with its programs. “Our customer success team provides both strategic planning and engineering resources to assist marketers in planning, testing, and expanding programs over time at no additional cost,” says Mohamoud.
He explains that its primary competition comes from established marketing cloud solutions like Exact Target and Responsys who have existing relationships with ecommerce brands and look to provide a level of automated, triggered email support on top of many other services. “There are also more holistic personalization providers that cover more than email, such as Monetate and Bloomreach, but these companies fail to do email as a core competency,” he says.
Bluecore works with retailers looking to recapture or engage with customers who had visited and left an ecommerce storefront. Bluecore typically works with retailers who have multi-million dollars revenues per year, including brands like BCBG, Tommy Hilifiger, Jockey, Lucky Brand, Brooks Brothers, Camping World, Blue Nile, and Rebecca Taylor.
Bluecore Opportunity
While Bluecore says its current product solution is focused directly on the email marketing channel, its ability to dynamically react to changes in customer and catalog behaviors in seconds leaves the door open to support marketers across their marketing suites. SW
