Bislr, a startup that’s officially launching today, was built to solve one of the problems that CEO Michael Sharkey said that he himself faced in his past startups — the need to quickly build a website that integrates the different applications that marketers use.
So Bislr integrates with existing marketing automation (MA) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, layering on a drag-and-drop website builder and additional analytics. The idea is to allow marketers to launch new campaign websites without having to consult a developer, and those sites collect relevant customer data and be easily edited based on that data.
The company is also announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by Southern Cross Venture Partners, with participation by Tim Draper and Terry and Katrina Garnett.
Sharkey gave me a quick demo covering a number of the major features. The basic building blocks of a Bislr websites include the company’s “social apps”, which allow marketers to easily embed content from your social networking accounts onto the company website — so if they come up with a brilliant promotional video, they’re not driving traffic to YouTube, but to their own site. And the websites are automatically optimized for mobile and other
Behind the scenes, Bislr also creates a profile of each visitor and “everything they’re doing when they’re touching the site,” Sharkey said. When possible, it also pulls social data from around the web about each visitor — so businesses can see in real-time tweets and Facebook updates from people visiting their site. And the service makes it easy to act on that data, too. For example, if a business wants to test out different wording or different designs, Bislr can run A/B tests on a small group of users, then automatically select the version that’s better.
Sharkey founded the company with his two brothers. They’ve been testing out the system with a few small businesses, he said, but now they’ve opened up and are ready to serve larger customers.
Bislr delivers intelligent website marketing products that enable marketers to immediately create, optimize and manage their websites for the social and mobile era. Designed for web marketers to actively control the entire lifecycle of next-generation websites through drag & drop creation, social/mobile channels, real-time testing and analytics. Bislr complements customers’ investment in marketing automation & CRM systems, making them more valuable by contributing new leads and integrating modern/mobile platforms for more impactful marketing campaigns.
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