Many consumers engage with e-commerce brands through various digital channels, including social media, text messages, and email. These brands often send out promotions and discounts, but they struggle with low engagement and read rates. According to Gartner, these ineffective marketing personalization efforts can lead to a 38% customer attrition risk.
Stefanos Loukakos, the former head of Meta’s business-focused Messenger division, believed that the solution to this problem lay in leveraging algorithms to deliver marketing messages at the right time and to the right individuals. To put this theory to the test, Loukakos co-founded Connectly in 2020. Connectly provides a platform for businesses to create messaging campaigns and automate conversations with customers across various messaging apps. Recently, Connectly announced a successful Series A funding round, securing $7.85 million in investment. The round was led by Volpe Capital, with participation from RX Ventures and DST Global, bringing Connectly’s total funding to $17.25 million.
Loukakos partnered with Yandong Liu, a former lead engineer on Uber’s machine learning team, whom he met through mutual connections in the founder community.
Through Connectly, brands can design campaigns and deploy chatbots to automate text message conversations with their customers. Loukakos sees Connectly as a means for brands to engage with customers who might otherwise slip through the cracks.
Connectly’s platform allows for tailored suggestions, helping customers discover products they will love while providing companies with valuable insights into their customers. Unlike traditional automation platforms that focus on one-way messages, Connectly specializes in two-way conversations with both current and potential buyers, offering both outbound and inbound solutions.
For instance, if a customer abandons a shopping cart on a brand’s website, Connectly can detect this and send them a message to inquire about the reason for not making a purchase. If the customer is deemed “high value,” Connectly can offer them a discount or lower-cost shipping.
On the backend, Connectly’s AI analyzes customer preferences, creating audience segments, and presents this information to brands through a unified dashboard. The platform provides real-time insights into the connection between messages and sales. Connectly’s AI uses natural language processing to understand customer sentiments and provide accurate recommendations. Additionally, it employs machine learning to interpret and prioritize inbound messages, tagging them for the appropriate agents and tasks.
The challenge is to strike the right balance, as text message marketing can easily annoy users. A recent survey of approximately 1,200 SMS users revealed that nearly half found text message marketing irritating, and 28% abandoned brands due to this irritation.
Despite this challenge, Connectly has shown promise with a customer base of around 200 brands and an annual recurring revenue exceeding $1 million. In a competitive landscape with established players like Twilio and emerging startups such as MessageBird and Attentive, Connectly is poised for growth. Loukakos anticipates expanding the company’s workforce from 35 employees to nearly 40 by the end of 2023.
