Bluecore raises $125M to drive retail customer retention using big data

Bluecore, a marketing technology firm that specialises in customer retention, has raised $125 million in a Series E round of funding at a $1 billion valuation.

Prior to now, Bluecore had raised around $113 million, and with another $125 million in the bank from investors including Georgian, FirstMark, Norwest, and Silver Lake Waterman, they are now able to invest in further e-commerce product development and in AI and analytics.

They are also in an excellent position to challenge the likes of Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce with a more targeted offering built specifically for direct-to-consumer (D2C) retailers.

Founded in 2013, The New York-based company helps direct-to-consumer (D2C) retailers match first-party shopper data with product interactions, enabling them to design personalised mass marketing communications across various channels including email, e-commerce and digital ads. They work with numerous retailers such as Gap, Nike, Teleflora, Tommy Hilfiger, and CVS Pharmacy.

They help retailers improve their repeat custom metrics in order to achieve higher customer retention.

“There are a number of challenges for retail, but if you peel back the layers and look at the core, the primary issue is that 80% of customers only ever buy from a retailer once,” says Bluecore CEO Fayez Mohamood.  He argues that whilst all retailers want loyal customers, it becomes a greater issue for enterprise retailers, as the larger a retailer becomes “the larger the revenue potential that lies in retention is.”

He states that larger retailers are the ones that people continue to buy from and that large retailers consciously make “retention and shopper loyalty a key strategy for revenue growth.”

Technology plays a major role in helping companies “go digital,” and at the heart of this is data, which has often been described as the world’s most valuable resource today — more so than oil — given the role it plays in driving all manner of business decisions.

Bluecore captures shopper activity, such as what they’re searching for, clicking on and adding to their shopping carts and combines this with other data such as in-store transactions. All this data then culminates into a single view of consumers shopping behaviours, identity and catalogues.

“Using this data set, we can immediately automate actions across channels with the goal of continuously creating matches between each individual shoppers and the products they’ll love,” according to Mahmood.

The company was built for the world of online shopping with the global pandemic being a major driver of digital transformation, as countless traditional retailers were forced into bankruptcy or having to downsize their high street presence.

“In 2020, the whole world moved to digital shopping,” Mohamood added, offering “a data-rich environment for connecting shoppers to the next-best product that gets them to buy again and again.”