Today German startup Spectrm, a marketing platform that helps businesses turn customer conversations on messaging apps into insights and revenue, raised €2.7 million in Series A funding from international venture capital fund Runa Capital.
Spectrm, founded in 2016, automates personalised one-to-one conversations to engage and convert customers. The AI-powered platform helps marketers guide the customers from websites, ads, and messenger apps like Facebook Messenger to final purchases. It streamlines a usually disconnected, multi-touchpoint marketing funnel into a fun and interactive conversation. The result is a personalised, instant and effortless buying journey that generates declared data on customer preferences. Spectrm also helps marketers leverage the data collection to build meaningful segments, optimise their funnel and build stronger customer relationships.
The startup has already got some global attention, with Facebook naming Spectrm a strategic developer partner and Gartner also labelling the company a Cool Vendor in the Natural Language Processing space, recognising the background technology behind the platform.
According to Global WebIndex research, social media users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day across eight social networks and messaging apps. Сonversational marketing remains one of the best and the most effective communication channels – Facebook Messenger marketing has 10-80 times better engagement than email. Despite such impressive results, conversational marketing remains underestimated as only 1 out of every 100 businesses engages customers automatically or with chatbots— an approach with massive reach and greater interactivity.
Max Koziolek, co-founder and CEO of Spectrm said: “At Spectrm, we believe conversation is a deeply human experience that is more effective and more insightful than any other format in marketing. Our vision is to combine the power of conversations with the reach of the largest platforms in the world”.
Dmitry Galperin, Partner at Runa Capital adds: “Today businesses all over the world are facing the greatest challenge of how to attract and retain customers. Instead of trying to cover all marketing communication channels, it is much more effective to direct efforts to those that generate the most customer insights and highest ROI. Conversational marketing is one of those channels. Thus, the solution offered by the Spectrm team is widely relevant across industries. We are excited to support the project.”
Spectrm focuses on mid-market and enterprise B2C firms in multiple verticals, powering companies like Ebay, Purple, Ford, Groupon, Renault, KLM, and others. In the past 12 months, the Spectrm platform enabled an average of 6 million interactions per month between brands and their customers.
