Meet Tinyclues, a French startup that is working with big e-commerce websites to make their marketing campaigns more effective. Chances are you’ve received emails that tell you what product you should buy based on your latest purchase. Tinyclues goes a step further and wants to improve buying rates from these kind of marketing campaigns.
The company just raised $5.5 million (€5 million) from Alven Capital, with existing investors ISAI and Elaia Partners also participating.
Here’s how Tinyclues works. After setting it up with your database of products and clients, the company’s servers will gather as much data as possible — purchase history, client information, navigation tracking, etc. Thanks to machine-learning from similar customers and big data analysis, Tinyclues can make educated suggestions for future purchases.
It works for email newsletters, mobile notifications and Facebook campaigns. And it seems to be working as the company claims 30 percent more revenue from these campaigns when you use Tinyclues compared to competitors.
Some of the biggest French e-commerce websites are using it, such as Fnac, 3Suisses, Vestiaire Collective, Price Minister, Sarenza and more. Now, the company plans on convincing international e-commerce websites as well thanks to today’s funding round.
There are a few key reasons why I think Tinyclues might have the edge on this tiny market. First, all the recommendations are automatic. You don’t need to manually find related products and dig through your product database — Tinyclues will make suggestions without any manual input.
Second, it uses a software-as-a-service approach, letting any e-commerce retailer try the service for a small subset of the site without much effort. It’s just a matter of plugging your existing website with the company’s servers.
Third, it seems like an interesting market for the startup. Tinyclues is basically increasing revenue for all these e-commerce retailers. It’s an easy sell when your value proposition is that your clients will make more money once they switch to Tinyclues.
It’s also all about keeping up with the right e-commerce service providers, CRMs and marketing tools so that Tinyclues becomes just another brick to make its clients’ existing workflow more efficient. Now let’s just hope you won’t ever received a dumb product suggestion again from your favorite e-commerce website.