How startup tinyclues is making a big impact on retail marketing

Everyone has received that email before. You know, the one you brace for when you sign up for an ecommerce site (or any other) and have to provide your email address.  Whether you decide to buy a recommended product, think about buying it later or at worse, unsubscribe from an email list, is anyone’s guess.

On the seller side of things, ecommerce merchants and retailers often ask themselves how they can improve their email campaigns. As Lengow prepares to give a platform to startups improving ecommerce during the Startup Spotlight contest (bit.ly/StartupSpotlightLengowDay) at Lengow Ecommerce Day in Paris on June 2, 2015, now is the perfect time to focus on innovators creating solutions for problems.

According to a December 2014 post on the blog of Lengow Hub member Shopify written by VentureHarbour Founder Marcus Taylor, email marketing accounts for more than 7 percent of all ecommerce transactions. Taylor also pointed out that this means that email ranks second only to search (a topic thoroughly discussed in Lengow Blog articles at bit.ly/LengowBlogMobileTips and bit.ly/LengowBlogSEOTips) as the marketing channel with the most impact. The latter accounts for 15.8 percent of transactions.

Targeting Trends

One SaaS startup that is helping ecommerce sites reach the right audience (that actually wants to receive emails) is the Paris-based tinyclues, which specializes in predictive marketing and CRM optimization.

Some marketers may have wondered why ecommerce thought leader Sandrine Decorde predicted that tinyclues will have a big impact on personalization in retail and CRM this year during her presentation at the HUB Institute’s Future of Retail conference in February 2015 (which was reviewed on the Lengow Blog).

A few big clues are below.

Secret Sauce

Led by Marketing-minded mathematician David Bessis (the startup’s CEO, who co-founded it in 2010) and his team of “activists,” tinyclues is focused on zeroing in on a target audience to help retailers create marketing campaigns that score more sales. In particular, the team harnesses the power of Big Data and Machine Learning, as Product Manager Sarah Touboul explained recently.

“The power of our SaaS solution lies in its ability to find ‘tiny clues’ from a large amount of data and turn them into actionable business insights, enabling our clients to overcome common preconceived segmentation ideas. Thanks to this, they can find the best customer match according to the content of the campaign they need to push,” said Touboul, who added that “tinyclues typically will identify the 10 percent of people who will achieve 90 percent of the purchase potential.”

Excellent Emails

Touboul and her team also pointed out that some of their clients include Cdiscount (featured on the Lengow Blog)and Lengow Hub member PriceMinister-Rakuten, which shared its insight via a keynote by Olivier Mathiot at the aforementioned #LengowDay in Paris last year.

According to tinyclues data, Price-Minister-Rakuten was able to send 45 percent less emails without reducing its CRM revenue thanks to tinyclues. They were also able to reduce their email unsubscribe rate by 30 percent without reducing the number of clicks on their newsletters.

Speaking to the earlier point that Touboul made, tinyclues also focuses on helping retailers  using personalized emails to get more out of less: increase revenue of email campaigns without increasing the number of emails sent.

The advice that the tinyclues team provided for Lengow Blog readers and all online merchants who want to boost their sales was diverse. Some of the tips for increasing the long time value of a customer base include looking for new marketing opportunities by targeting niche products and keeping in mind that third party advertisements (covered on the Lengow Blog here) are an excellent facilitator of more sales.