All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Dynata and CMNTY, mParticle, Pipedrive and Mailigen, The Hub, Bold360, WingArc, Zendesk and Hootsuite
mParticle raises US$45 million in Series D round
mParticle, the customer data platform (CDP) for multi-channel consumer brands, has raised US$45 million in Series D funding.
The latest round was led by Arrowroot Capital with participation from existing investors to accelerate the growth of its platform. It brings total funding in mParticle to date to over US$120 million.
mParticle helps brands unify their data sources, ensure data quality, and enable connections to hundreds of marketing and analytics APIs. The funding will be used for growth in key areas such as developing solutions to help brands improve the quality of their data, scaling global infrastructure to meet the needs of international privacy regulation and data sovereignty and building out key partnerships to help brands augment their understanding and the value of their data, beginning with LiveRamp to help brands deliver privacy-friendly personalisation at an unprecedented scale.
Pipedrive acquires Mailigen
CRM company, Pipedrive, has acquired Mailigen, provider of a cost-effective, easy-to-use email marketing automation solution.
Mailigen, the first acquisition for the company, will make it easier for Pipedrive customers to access software that generates leads and nurtures customers with the ease of use that is a hallmark of Pipedrive. Financial terms of the deal, the first acquisition made by Pipedrive to date, have not been disclosed.
Mailigen helps businesses acquire and build relationships with customers through email, social and mobile channels. Pipedrive CRM software, meanwhile, has been developed from the salesperson's point of view. The tool addresses sales professionals' most pressing needs: speeding up prospecting and lead qualification, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks, and gaining greater visibility into sales performance.
"The Mailigen team has exceptional technical know-how and shares our commitment to ease of use. Together, we will offer sales and email marketing solutions that solve more of our customers' problems and are even more useful," said Pipedrive co-founder, Timo Rein.
The Hub comes to MMP World Wide
Technology company, CtrlShift, is taking its enterprise advertising software, The Hub, across the globe with leading premium programmatic marketplace provider, MMP World Wide.
The Hub is enterprise advertising software for unified media planning, activation and insights. It aggregates platforms, including social, search and programmatic so brands and agencies can advertise anywhere with a single login and achieve more.
With The Hub, MMP World Wide can now access multiple industry-leading, pre-evaluated platforms via a single login, allowing them to advertise across search, social, programmatic and various media buying platforms that connect to a wide-ranging audience network. The Hub is integrated with the likes of MediaMath, AppNexus, iPinYou, Zemanta, Amobee, Verizon Media, Facebook and DV360, and connect into ad servers and DMPs.
The Hub also provides an automation layer that complements the extensive knowledge and goal-oriented strategies of MMP World Wide’s trading team, allowing them to optimise campaigns from inception to execution and post-campaign in a near real-time environment for maximum efficiency.
New updates to Bold360
LogMeIn has launched updates for Bold360, its artificial intelligence-powered customer engagement suite.
These include new features to aggregate information from disparate systems for actionable insights which help eliminate friction in the customer experience, improve agent performance, and increase operational efficiency.
Updates include a new dynamic customer information card with real-time customer activity, such as adding items to a shopping cart; new agent statistics such as number of chats answered and customer satisfaction with the level of service the agent provided directly in the agent workspace; and visitor blocking which can stop communication with customers who conduct themselves improperly, removing distractions that take away from a support team’s ability to resolve reasonable customer needs.
WingArc Australia releases new in-store video tech for retail
WingArc Australia, which develops software and solutions for data analytics, visualisation and processing, has released a new tool to help bricks and mortar retailers fight back against online competitors.
WingArc Retail Analytics uses video analytics on the store’s CCTV camera feed to count customers and track their movements on a virtual heatmap, helping stores to increase revenue through insights into customer behaviour. It also integrates with point-of-sale data to build detailed reports on the store’s performance.
"For online, there's Google Analytics. Now physical stores can use data to understand the customer journey, improve the experience and make sure there's always enough people on duty to help," said WingArc Australia CEO, Steven Hulse.
Zendesk launches new support and sales CRM tools
Zendesk has launched new support and sales suites, expanding its CRM solutions with the aim of enabling service and sales teams to connect with customers and have natural conversations across all touchpoints.
The new support suite allows businesses to see one comprehensive view of all the latest conversations so service agents and customers can have personalised interactions from start to finish. The new workspace provides agents with the relevant context and tools, whether the customer calls, emails or messages the company, allowing them to continue the conversation on the channel that makes the most sense.
Zendesk also announced that support suite now includes emerging social messaging channels powered by Sunshine Conversations, Zendesk’s recently launched conversational business platform. This allows companies to engage with customers on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, WeChat and LINE from one unified agent workspace. Other social messaging capabilities include a live notifications view for agents to stay on top of all conversations in real-time as well as auto-responders so customers will receive an immediate response, even if an agent is not available.
Hootsuite debuts new listening tool
Social media management platform, Hootsuite, has nveiled a new listening solution, Insights Powered by Brandwatch.
The solution is accessible via the Hootsuite dashboard and is designed to elevate consumer intelligence by helping marketers find and analyse the most pertinent and complex conversations surrounding their brand.
Key use cases for brands include understanding how they’re being perceived within global social and digital conversations, allowing them to turn social data into specific actions including a better ability to react to trending moments in social, improved ad creative and targeted messaging, and better brand protection, including issues and crisis management.
Through the new integration, qualifying users can track specific topics online through refined Brandwatch searches, tracking streams of social mentions and collecting data from over 100 million sources including social media, blogs and news sites.
Dynata and CMNTY partnership
First-party data and insights platform, Dynata, has partnered with Cmnty Corporation, a global provider of online community platforms for companies, to help brands improve audience engagement.
The pair plan to achieve this by helping brands leverage insights for ongoing, deeper engagement, creating a more complete picture of their customers and generating stronger, more resilient relationships. To do this, Dynata's access to 62 million consumers and business professionals – the largest of its kind in the insights industry – is being brought together with Cmnty's online community-building capabilities, brands can stay connected with consumers in real-time, ensuring they have a secure place to share opinions and sentiments on products, services and other activities.
The Cmnty platform combines online quantitative and qualitative data collection methods with data analysis tools, AI-base visualisation and automated reporting solutions, allowing companies to host online group discussions, co-creation sessions, surveys, mood boards, heat maps and private messaging.
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