SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Autopilot, the visual marketing software for automating customer journeys, today announced a $12M strategic investment led by Blackbird Ventures. The round, which brings total funding to $32M, includes participation from current investors including Rembrandt Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Southern Cross Venture Partners. To help marketers truly understand their impact on customer experience, Autopilot is also announcing the launch of Insights, a fitness tracker for journey marketers to set, track and measure goals.
“We live in an experience-based world where good marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all, yet companies today still view their customers as a name and an email in a spreadsheet,” said Mike Sharkey, co-founder and CEO of Autopilot. “With the launch of Insights and continued support from our investors, we’re helping marketers move beyond batch and blast email to create remarkable multi-channel experiences across the entire customer journey.”
Over the past 12 months, Autopilot has opened international offices in San Francisco and Sydney, has nearly tripled revenue, has expanded its customer base to serve over 2,300 businesses in 90 countries, including Microsoft, Atlassian, Lyft, Freshdesk, Crunchbase and Patreon. Autopilot platform usage, including messages sent and events processed, is doubling every 90 days and now exceeds 1 billion events per month. It is also just one of two solutions recognized in all three of Capterra’s Marketing Automation Reports, which ranks the top 20 most popular, most user-friendly and most affordable solutions on the market.
Top marketers have shifted from focusing purely on customer acquisition, to driving growth and satisfaction through the full lifecycle by being more personal and contextual in how they engage. However, most marketers today still struggle to connect the dots between campaigns and business results, despite having more data at their fingertips than ever before. A recent survey found one third of marketers lack access to the data and analytics they need to assess their performance, and 63 percent say it’s hindering their ability to deliver a superior customer experience.
To help parse signal from noise, Autopilot is launching Insights, an effortless way for marketers to visualize and track the performance of their customer journeys against a goal, much like a fitness tracking app. Within 60 seconds, marketers can track the winning channels, metrics and messages needed to convert more revenue and optimize for a better customer experience. Over 700 Autopilot customers participated in early-testing of Insights, with more than half saying Insights helped them significantly increase journey performance, and 71 percent said they now feel more confident in the impact of their marketing.
Others like Microsoft’s Developer Community have been able to engage their audience in new ways that don’t feel like marketing. For example, Chanse Arrington, Global Head of Developer Business Tools at Microsoft, was able to set a signup goal for the company’s annual BUILD conference and then track, measure and report on progress in-real time.
“Developers are a notoriously difficult group to market to. They require constant engagement and hyper-focused communications spanning long periods of time just to keep their attention,” said Chanse Arrington, Global Head of Developer Business Tools at Microsoft. “With Insights, it was dead easy to fire up and send targeted communications on the fly with very little effort. What’s more, executives love that I can show how core KPIs are tracking in real-time, without needing a data translator, right from my phone.”
For the first time, marketers can forego spreadsheets, pivot tables and manual integrations for seamless tracking and reporting that connects with any tool stack and works out of the box. Said Kevin Sides, CMO of e-commerce order fulfillment startup Shipmonk: “With Insights, I've been able to delve into the minutia of each step in our journeys and optimize on what's been working. It's been really good to connect the growth that's unfolding with our sales department back to the nurture journeys in Autopilot.”
Key Insights capabilities include:
- Goal tracking: Insights helps to rally teams around key business goals by allowing users the opportunity to create, achieve, and share their journey conversion goals in a few clicks.
- Conversion metrics: Never lose focus on the end goal - conversion. Monitor conversion trends and see who, and how quickly, someone converts across any channel from email to postcard.
- Aggregate email performance: See how your emails are performing and trending at a roll up, journey-level. Identify key times and days of the week to send emails by looking at results in various increments, and even get as deep as hourly level performance.
- Identify winning messages: Drill into individual, multi-channel message results on a day-by-day basis. Easily compare A/B tests and determine winners.
Insights is generally available today, and is included in all Autopilot plans, which start from $20/month. To learn more and sign up, visit: www.autopilothq.com/insights.html.
About Autopilot
Autopilot is visual marketing software for automating customer journeys. With native integrations to Salesforce, Twilio, Segment, Slack and Zapier and the ability to connect to over 800 purpose-built tools, we empower marketers to nurture relationships and grow high-paying customers using email, web, SMS and direct mail channels. Founded in 2012, Autopilot has offices in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia. The company serves over 2,300 B2B and B2C customers, including Microsoft, Atlassian, Lyft, Freshdesk, Crunchbase and Laser Clinics Australia.
About Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce is the fastest growing top five enterprise software company and the #1 CRM provider globally. Salesforce Ventures—the company’s corporate investment group—invests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world’s largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce’s innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce's expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 200 enterprise cloud startups in 14 different countries since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.