Sequoia-backed startup offers product that aims to lower customer acquisition costs

Digital marketing has gotten substantially more difficult over the years.

Not only do internet giants like Google and Facebook constantly change their algorithms, but customer acquisition costs (CAC) for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies have increased by 50% over the past five years.

And while the internet is saturated with content — publishing an article has never been easier – this wealth of choices can paradoxically make it more difficult for marketers to find their audience and decide on the most efficient targeting and conversion strategy.

The Insider management team / Photo credit: Insider

It’s against this backdrop that different companies started coming up with their own tools and solutions. One of them is Singapore-based Insider, an “integrated growth marketing platform” that delivers a broad feature set targeting four key marketing metrics: acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue.

“What we do is increase creativity by giving [marketers] a tool and independence from a technical team, as well as decrease customer acquisition costs and increase conversion rates and revenue,” says Serhat Soyuerel, co-founder and vice president of growth for Insider.

Businesses crippled by customer acquisition

Having ran an ecommerce website in the past, Soyuerel was well acquainted with the crippling effects of a high CAC. He found that the same was true for the businesses he’s worked with at Insider.

“We’ve seen lots of failure stories from ecommerce not because they were unable to make any revenue, bust because of customer acquisition costs,” he says.

With this in mind, the executive and his team came up with a growth marketing platform with two key differentiators.

The first is that it’s an integrated tool, which means marketers can drive growth across the entire funnel, from the beginning of a customer journey until its natural end. Soyuerel says the existing tools in the market are either too expensive or only address a specific metric, like customer retention.

Second, it uses machine learning to power its segmentation and predictive analysis features.

The platform is able to anticipate whether or not a customer is likely to make a purchase in the next week based on his or her activity over the past 30 days, across different channels, such as web, mobile web, and apps.

To get better insights on user behavior and preferences, it also considers over 90 parameters, such as the user’s location, device, and preferred website. From there, marketers can make relevant strategies across different channels to push customers to purchase.

The tool is built on top of a unified data layer that allows it to collect user information by matching user IDs with behavioral, historical, cross-device, cross-browser, and third-party data.

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