Traction Watch: FollowAnalytics promises enterprise marketers fast, deep mobile and IoT analytics
According to research firm Flurry, total time spent in mobile apps in 2014 was 88 percent, compared to just 12 percent for mobile websites. Another survey, from BBC World News, shows consumers expect brands to have a strong mobile presence.
Enterprise marketers know it's critical these days to connect with users via mobile. But they often struggle to develop a mobile app that provides strong user analytics, which in turn can help brands create a secure, personalized, meaningful engagement with their users/customers.
Marketers also need their mobile app platform to connect to their enterprise CRM and other marketing systems, to gain a more holistic' view of who their customers are and how they are engaging with the brand over mobile.
Spring 2015 DEMO Traction champion FollowAnalytics (category: Operations/Learning) has developed a "1:1 mobile marketing platform" that CEO Samir Addamine said helps enterprise marketers solve those challenges and successfully transition to "a mobile first" strategy.
FollowAnalytics' platform promises that Global 2000 enterprise marketers can get up to speed quickly with analytics on user behavior, their competitors' app performance; and more, Addamine said.
Specifically, within "two minutes" marketers can discover how their apps are faring against competitors. In "two days" from adoption, marketers will be able to analyze user behavior and engagement based on analytics culled from mobile apps as well as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. And in "two weeks," based on this knowledge, marketers will be able to engage their users with "highly personalized, automated, one-to-one mobile campaigns."
FollowAnalytics has built "the first uniformed suite for enterprise mobile marketers to learn, analyze, and engage," says Addamine.
The startup, based in San Francisco with offices in Montreal and Paris, has been on a growth trajectory since it officially launched at DEMO 2013, Addamine said. FollowAnalytics has grown from three to 35 employees and has 45 customers, 21 of which are Fortune 500 companies in the luxury retail, insurance/banking, travel, automotive and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industries. Customers include Bayer, L'Oreal, Louis Vuitton, Renault, SAP, and Allianz.
"Twenty months ago, we had 15,000 client mobile customers connected to our product," Addamine reported. "Today, we have around 30 million," the majority of which are in insurance/banking, followed by luxury retail. FollowAnalytics expects to have as many as 70 million client mobile customers by 2017.
Among FollowAnalytics "unique" features are its Mobile Marketing Scorecard, a free tool for giving marketers a quick view of how their apps are performing in terms of visibility, audience reach, and other metrics, as well as how their performance compares to their competitors, said Addamine. Other key features include mobile user profiling and advanced segmentation; click-and-connect' CRM for integrating FollowAnalytics with CRM systems such as Salesforce; as well as the ability to obtain analytics on data coming from both mobile apps as well as IoT devices.
Though Addamine didn't disclose funding during his DEMO Traction presentation, the startup's most recently announced investment was a $7.5 million round in March 2015, according to VentureBeat.
While FollowAnalytics offers an unusual combination of mobile app and IoT device analytics integrated with CRM, the company has no shortage of competitors (to one degree or another), including Localytics and Mixpanel.
"DEMO Traction is all about recognizing emerging companies with great ideas, good market traction and a compelling product demonstration," said Erick Schonfeld, executive producer of DEMO, following the spring DEMO Traction Watch conference. "FollowAnalytics was selected as a DEMO Traction Champion this year for their outstanding performance in all these areas."
Editor's note: Traction Watch is a new column focused obsessively on growth, and is a companion to the DEMO Traction conference series, which brings together high-growth startups with high-potential customers. The next DEMO Traction will take place in Boston on September 16, 2015. Growth companies can apply to present, or those similarly obsessed can register here to attend.
This is the fifth and final entry in a series of posts profiling the Spring 2015 Demo Traction Champions. Read more about the winners in "Traction Watch: Meet The Spring 2015 DEMO Traction Champions."