Budapest-based Recart nabs €2.8 million in funding, with around €2 million from Enter Tomorrow venture capital fund (managed by Lead Ventures), and around €205K each from Oktogon Ventures and Day One Capital, respectively. Recart will use the investment to further develop its automated online marketing software, boost sales, expand US presence, and double the development team within a few months.
Budapest-based Recart has so far generated around €165 million additional revenues for its clients. The mobile marketing platform helps thousands of webshops by convincing interested buyers to complete their abandoned purchases, through analyzed real-time behavioural data.
Recart built the first version of its product in 2016 to resolve a serious problem, namely that over three-quarter of purchases are never completed by customers. The process is halted, and the chosen items remain in the basket. “Most often it [purchase completion] does not happen because people lose interest in the product or shopping, but usually [because of] some kind of outside factor”, said Soma Tóth Founder-Managing Director.
Today, Recart assists online stores that are mostly Shopify clients in full marketing automatization, so they can stay in touch with their customers in a more effective way. Based on their analysis of real-time behavioural data, interested buyers can be addressed with high accuracy. Webshops can manage to hold onto customers by, for instance, offering them a personal discount, to earn revenues they otherwise might have lost. For this purpose, Recart has developed an online marketing platform which automates e-store communication and marketing activities with customers on various message sending platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. Recart was one of the first in the world to make such automated messages available on Facebook Messenger at the end of 2017, to lower the number of abandoned shopping baskets.
Recart has also managed to initiate two-way discussions with customers by SMS, who can receive personalized offers and can ask questions. “This not only makes it easier to complete a purchase, but also makes data collection more effective and improves customer loyalty” said Soma Tóth.
While the reach of promotional e-mails shows a continuously declining tendency, Messenger messages can boost opening rates to 85-90% and click rates to 20%. SMS messages boast even better rates, with opening rates at 98%, and click rates at 40%. Since WhatsApp has even more users than Messenger, the solution will become available as well from the third quarter.
