CleverTap — Engaging in Growth
The news article is funding information for CleverTap, a mobile marketing platform that announce its completion of a $35 million Series C funding round (https://www.clickz.com/clevertap-funding-series-c/256611/).
The funding would have brought its total valuation to $385 million. The focus of the company is on user retention and customer lifetime value. The company claims that they have generated $2 billion in incremental revenue for their customers with major customers including Sony, Domino’s, 7-Eleven, and ESPN.
A quick review of the different services offered on CleverTap suggests how there is still a significant gap in the mobile marketing industry that is enabling the company’s success. There is evidently a high level of popularity that has emerged in mobile marketing but many seems to be unable to make sense of the data produced from their users in order to effectively market to them. Perhaps this is often reflected with new and emerging industries as businesses are only focused around the actual product itself in order to align with the trends but never engaging with means of fully utilizing the mobile analytics CleverTap is able to address this market gap by providing a comprehensive framework and solution.
One interesting service has been using machine learning to improve conversion rates. Machine learning is often an important component in data analytics and prove to be extremely useful in the marketing and customer engagement industry. I remember reading a previous book that highlighted how machine learning and statistical analysis would allow UPS to be able to predict which customers may be ending their relationship with the company, and thus engaging with them prior to this thought formation in order to better retain them. Similarly, this can be applied to mobile marketing contexts as well where aspects such as conversion rate and retention can all be modified and enhanced with machine learning processes.
The successfulness of CleverTap highlights many of the deficiencies in the market as there is the lack of understanding towards the different metrics. However, this is by no means to say that CleverTap is the most successful, and there may be some concerns with employing third party services. A large reason could be the blanket strategy applied to retention and conversion. This may be beneficial to some companies, but are not unique enough. The point that I want to highlight is that many companies and executives should be careful when it comes to issues of technology compounded with a lack of understanding at the same time. Specifically, this points to how each company may have their own unique culture and relationship with their customers where it requires more customized approaches as to how they should be converted and retained. It would also be interesting to see how hands-on CleverTap is with their customers in providing such solutions.
