Behind the App: Marsello
Marsello is an app that combines data-powered automation and real human experts to run targeted retention marketing that gets results for fast-growing brands. From loyalty and VIP programs to email automation, Marsello makes it easy for merchants to target the right customer at the right time, with the right message.
We recently sat down with Matt Thomas, Marsello’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer to talk about their journey to build an app for BigCommerce and what’s next on their roadmap.
Hi, Matt. Tell me about Marsello.
Our vision for Marsello has always been to provide retailers with the power of an entire marketing team — a ‘virtual marketing expert’ that helps retailers grow their business’ both online and in-store, automatically.
Today, we provide retailers with a variety of tool that helps them to master their loyalty and email marketing. Our secret sauce is that we use customer segmentation to create a profile of each customer in a retailer’s BigCommerce account giving retailers the power to develop targeted marketing that encourages customers to make more purchases because it’s based on their shopping behavior and the shopping behavior of customers like them.
Why did you decide to build this app?
Most retailers aren’t trained marketers and software developers, and they’re incredibly busy running their business — or it’s a ‘side-hustle’ created with the ambition to grow it to something much bigger. Often, they don’t have the funding that more established businesses have, so it’s difficult to hire the talent required to focus on marketing that delivers sales. We knew that we could do this through software.
The timing is right for us; with retailers online and their stores connected and ready to go via the internet, all their customer and sales data is accessible and can be used to create valuable tools for those retailers. Data science is a more established discipline now, so for us, we’re trying to leverage the data we have across thousands of retailers to understand what works for them, and to use that to provide suggestions on how to turn that hard-earned $1 that’s spent into $2 of revenue. It’s an exciting opportunity.
Tell us about the journey to build Marsello.
We have a strong passion for software development and marketing. When we started, my twin brother and I were software developers but moonlighted as online marketers. We wanted to bring those performance marketing benefits to the real world — helping retailers with a program that worked with the online store and physical store. We have since grown our team to 25, with a talented mix of marketers, developers and customer engagement specialists. Our Co-Founder, Brent Spicer, is establishing a US-based sales office to accelerate our growth.
Regarding must-have functionality in our app, we use the RICE product management framework for deciding what features to build next and use Intercom for communicating with our beta customers. We define a set of success criteria for each feature we build and make a decision to roll it to production once we’re satisfied with the results.
How did you build it?
Our web application is built on ASP.net MVC framework and serviced by a MongoDB database. We love AWS — our solution is completely hosted on the AWS EC2 cloud, utilizing Elastic Beanstalk for on-demand scalability, and Code Deploy for continuous deployment.
For our data and machine learning stack, we use AWS Chalice, Gateway, Step and Lambda functions. We use SK learn, pandas, and Athena under the hood for executing our data science algorithms.
From the BigCommerce stack, we use the REST API and Webhooks for receiving sales, customer, and product data. We use the Storefront API to deploy our loyalty widgets, giving the retailer’s customers the ability to check their own rewards and balances.
The next phase for us is trying to simplify the retailers’ experience and empower them to act on the data-driven marketing suggestions. We are playing with messaging and bot frameworks currently, which is super fun and exciting.
What challenges did you encounter along the way?
Marsello has been an interesting ride technically. The most difficult part has been trying to keep it simple. Throughout our journey, we’ve encountered four main challenges:
Unifying Data Across Multiple Channels.
At Marsello we want to make the consumer experience simple and seamless, across all the channels a consumer might visit. To accomplish that — you have to be where they are. This ideal has been a driving factor behind our strategy and led us to build integrations with the retailer’s online store, point of sale, and social platforms. Our goal is to create a single view of the customer which you can act on, but it does create headaches to keep in sync.
Scaling for Growth.
Since launching Marsello, we’ve had some good fortune and our customers have grown a lot. That type of growth and success have forced us to change and evolve our tech platform multiple times over our lifetime to meet the demands of our growing businesses. These changes have included changing to AWS, using lambdas, database changes to NoSQL, caching, etc.
Working with Available APIs.
To power our solution, we need access to data in real-time, and the ability to work online and in store. We have struggled with rate limits, lack of webhooks, lack abandoned cart support, ability to create complex discounts. This has meant we have had to build many workarounds to fulfill the solution our customers need. Bigcommerce’s APIs are some of the best we’ve integrated with.
Knowing What to Build.
Finally, one of the main challenges of a growing business is resisting the urge to build everything requested. We receive a lot of great customer feedback and always have opportunities for growth and additional product investment. To help guide us, we use a prioritization tool called RICE. RICE is an acronym for evaluating new ideas by reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This process helps to ensure that you’ll build something for the better of everyone, not just one or two customers.
What are your tips for being successful in the BigCommerce App Marketplace?
- Develop a good customer success function in your business and pride yourself on good support.
- Work with the team at BigCommerce. Develop relationships where you can right across the business, from marketing to development.
Finally, What’s Next for Marsello?
We’re building the Marsello Expert! This will be a bot that will tell the retailer what marketing they should do and provide updates on its success. We are super excited about this!
