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Optimove acquires Kumulos to expand mobile capabilities of CRM marketing platform

CRM, Businessperson touching virtual human icon for customer experience data concept.
Image Credit: Dilok Klaisataporn // Getty Images

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Customer relationship management (CRM) marketing platform maker Optimove today announced the acquisition of Kumulos, a Dundee, Scotland-based provider of a personalized messaging platform for mobile applications. Terms of the transaction were not revealed.

The acquisition is a key to Optimove’s plans to expand the native messaging capabilities of its highly customizable CRM marketing package, which enables companies to connect more efficiently with customers and provide a personalized, multichannel sales experiences at scale.

Kumulos uses business intelligence (BI) in its mobile messaging app to enable retailers and service providers to better engage and communicate with their customers. The application provides marketing teams with an intuitive platform to send highly personalized push notifications and in-app messages to mobile devices and websites. 

Kumlulos’ automation engine, equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), is designed to deliver engagement messages when potential customers are most ready to interact, based on knowledge stored in the business intelligence engine.

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Managing large-scale CRM campaigns

Optimove helps data-rich companies across industries to manage large-scale CRM marketing frameworks, the company’sfounder and CEO, Pini Yakuel, said in a media advisory.

“By personalizing thousands of campaigns in hundreds of segments, Optimove enables brands to reach their customers with the right message on the right channel,” Yakuel said. “Unlike other technologies that rely on common, rule-based orchestration, Optimove’s AI-driven solutions autonomously determine the next-best action for each individual customer, eliminating the need for marketers to manually map every customer journey.”

Optimove calls itself the “science-first relationship marketing hub.” The suite of apps autonomously transforms customer data into actionable insights, Yakuel said. The company’s proprietary IT enables the smart orchestration, measurement and optimization of highly personalized multichannel campaigns at scale, Yakuel said.

Using a home-built customer data platform (CDP) at its core, Optimove offers marketing teams direct access to their customer data to build, test and optimize hundreds of CRM campaigns weekly, Yakuel said. The Kumulos acquisition bolsters Optimove’s AI engine by adding native mobile capabilities that can be used in several channels, he said.

With the Kumulos acquisition, Optimove will enable marketers to: 

  • Re-engage customers with mobile push notifications that support rich media, templates, and deep linking, which are delivered based on each customer’s usage history;
  • Create customized in-app messages with on-brand overlays and inbox messages for onboarding experiences, customer-based messaging, and rich in-app communications that provide the ultimate personalized experience to every customer;
  • Maximize opt-ins and conversions with fully customizable permission overlays and soft prompts, as well as personalized rich media web push messages that adapt to each customer’s on-site behavior;
  • Trigger higher-accuracy automated messages leveraging geofences and beacon technology combined with real-time behavior, customer attributes and preferences; and
  • Acquire new mobile app users from websites, emails, social media, digital advertising and out-of-home advertising with deferred deep linking powered by universal smart links and web-to-app banners that intelligently navigate each customer to their destination.

Companies share collaborative culture

“We were already partnered with Optimove and share an open, collaborative culture, so integrating our technology into its UI as a fully native solution was seamless,” Kumulos cofounder Bob Lawson said in a media advisory. Lawson will transition into the role of director of mobile offering at Optimove. 

Kumulos cofounder and CEO Mark Petrie also will join Optimove, serving as the director of engineering for mobile services, the company released in a statement.

Optimove’s CRM marketing platform sends more than 81 billion optimized messages every year, the company said. The company serves more than 500 well-known brands, including Dollar Shave Club, Entain, BetMGM, Staples, JD Sports, Papa John’s, Pennsylvania Lottery, Family Dollar and others. Kumulos’ customer base includes quick-service restaurants (Subway, Pizza Pizza), logistics (CargoLux, UPS), travel and hospitality (Sandals and Beaches, Network Rail) and healthcare (Sanofi, Roche, Ellerca Health).

Throughout the past six months,13-year-old Optimove has raised $75 million in funding to accelerate its platform development through M&A and strategic hiring, increasing its workforce to 340 employees. The team will utilize existing SDKs for all major operating systems, including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Cordova/Ionic, Unity and Xamarin to bring differentiated mobile marketing solutions to the CRM market.

Optimove, whose parent company is Mobius Solutions, competes in a cutthroat CRM market with Salesforce, Adobe, Hubspot, Acoustic, Pegasystems, SAP, SAS, Oracle, Cheetah Digital, Emarsys and Redpoint Global.

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