10 Cool Marketing Automation Startups to Watch

10. TriggerMail

What they do: Provide software that helps ecommerce marketers implement automated and personalized behavior-based triggered marketing systems at scale.

Headquarters: New York, N.Y.

CEO: Fayez Mohamood. Previously, he was Head of Product at BigDoor.

Founded: 2013

Funding: $1.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors.

Problem they tackle: Many consumers visit ecommerce sites, browse around, and then never purchase anything. Many are just doing research or virtual window shopping, but a significant subset of these could be converted into customers if retailers knew how to better appeal to these people.

What many retailers attempt to do is convert prospects through behavior-based or triggered email campaigns. The trouble is that many retailers end up spending millions of dollars each year on email campaigns designed to reach these elusive customers, but the results typically aren’t impressive.

According to TriggerMail, the flaw with most of these campaigns is that they tend to rely on a hodge-podge of expensive, IT-intensive enterprise service providers, including ecommerce platforms, recommendation systems, ESPs, and business intelligence systems – all deployed in the hope of enticing customers to re-engage via a single email.

These systems are labor intensive to implement, scale poorly, and fail to deliver the speed and flexibility required to engage with customers in a timely, meaningful manner. Worse still, the concept of personalization in most of these campaigns is simply to address you by name in the email.

Why they're on this list: Email remains the top marketing channel for ecommerce, and those that do it well – such as Amazon, the industry standard in this area, generating approximately $2 billion annually through their behavioral email channel – have a distinct advantage over competitors. However, those retailers that do it well are few and far between, with as much as 90 percent of Internet retailers not having any kind of behavior-based email trigger strategy.

TriggerMail addresses this problem with a turn-key JavaScript-based solution that helps marketers launch automated programs without ever having to consult with an IT team. Once set up, TriggerMail then automates the process of creating and distributing emails, dynamically reacting to both customer behaviors (browse, search, cart) and catalog changes (price change, back in stock, low inventory), all in seconds. This entire process from implementation to customer engagement takes days, not months or years.

Customers include: Tommy Hilfiger, BCBG, Wine Enthusiast, Perry Ellis Brands, Converse, Diamond Candles, Jack Threads, Evo, and Lolly Wolly Doodle.

Competitive Landscape: The most direct competitor is Smarter Remarketer. Additional competition will come from various established SaaS solutions like those from salesforce marketing cloud and Responsys. TriggerMail could also compete with data-driven personalization providers, such as Monetate and BloomReach, which include email as part of their marketing solutions.