SmartFocus

SmartFocus

Type	Privately Held
Industry	Marketing, Proximity Marketing, Marketing Personalization, Email Marketing, Predictive Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Mobile Marketing, SaaS, Customer Intelligence
Founded	Paris, France, 1999
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Number of locations	9 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Nick Heys, Founder Rob Mullen, CEO
Number of employees	500+
Website	www.smartfocus.com

SmartFocus is a SaaS platform that helps brands to deliver contextualized and personalized messages to customers. Its platform includes beacon technology that knows when a customer visits a physical store; real-time predictive recommendations generated at the precise moment a customer opens an email or visits a website; and powerful insights that use smart analysis of Big Data to effortlessly generate a truly personal experience.

The MessageCloud from SmartFocus enables marketers to own every customer moment, through smart and crowd insights, email, personalization and push messaging across any device, all on one platform. ^{[1] [2]}

Corporate history

Founder and original CEO Nick Heys established the business as Emailvision in 1999, with the goal of creating a technology platform that would enable marketers to leverage the power of online relationship marketing.^[3]

From the first office in France, the company expanded to the UK and Germany.^[4] By 2010, the company opened offices in the United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Hong Kong, and China ^[5] to provide service and support to a growing list of International clients. In 2010, Francisco Partners acquired a controlling interest in the company.^[4]

In 2011, the company bought two complementary software providers in the fields of social media and customer intelligence.^[6] In January, it acquired ObjectiveMarketer, a provider of social media marketing, to give email marketers the capability to integrate social media into their everyday campaigns.^[7] In June, it acquired SmartFocus Group, a company specializing in customer intelligence and multi-channel marketing software. Shortly after these acquisitions, the company moved their headquarters from Paris, France, to London, United Kingdom.^[8] In September 2012, the company acquired PredictiveIntent, a pioneer in behavioral targeting and predictive analytics technology.^[9]

In February 2013 Nick heys stepped down as CEO and Brad Wilson, former Worldwide General Manager of Microsoft Dynamics, was announced as the company's new CEO.^[10]

In May 2014, it was announced that Rob Mullen had taken over the role of CEO. Mullen has a strong track record in growing SaaS, personalization, CRM and analytics businesses. Prior to joining SmartFocus, he served as a Director of public companies, Non-Executive Director, and has held multiple CXO positions at high-growth companies such as AGT, 3iMind, I2 Technologies, Medseek, Opera, Chordiant, and IBM. In addition to his commitments as CEO, Mullen serves as a Chairman & Non-Executive Director of several early stage companies guiding their strategy and execution.

The company expanded its suite of products in the same month with the acquisition of marketing intelligence company, PivotLink, a provider of retail marketing intelligence and analytic applications.^[11]

In the summer of 2014 SmartFocus acquired Beacon technology specialist TagPoints and social media analytics provider Content Savvy as part of its strategy to develop the UK’s first omni-channel digital marketing system. These two key Big Data acquisitions position SmartFocus as an industry leader for mobile and location-based digital marketing. Its platform now offers customer engagement and analytics capabilities across all media channels, so clients can gain deeper insight into consumer behavior.

TagPoints was the first company to install beacon technology in a UK shopping center, and has since established itself as a leader in proximity marketing. Its mobile phone loyalty platform won an award at the 2014 Mobile World Congress ‘Barca Starta’ competition.

Using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology, Content Savvy offers the ability to follow and accurately interpret media channels, including Facebook posts, trending social media topics, blogs and video posts. Its acquisition enables SmartFocus to provide marketers with unprecedented capacity to engage with, and gain insight into, customer behavior. For example, using Content Savvy marketers can distinguish whether someone in an online conversation truly has the intent to buy and can subsequently export this information to CRM systems or customer databases.

Re-brand

In October 2013, the company changed its name from Emailvision to SmartFocus, in order to better reflect the vision, strategy and social capabilities that it brings to the market.

Clients

SmartFocus works with over 2,500 customers worldwide and works with global brands including, CamelBak, Ecco, Filofax, French Connection, Galeries Lafayette, House of Fraser, Office, Mercedes-Benz, Rossignol, Sainsburys, Selfridges, Skullcandy, SmartWool and Speedo.

Solutions from The Message Cloud

Internet of Everything

SmartFocus’ Internet of Everything solution allows brands to bring locations to life by connecting right to their customer’s phone. Marketers can pinpoint their customer right down to micro-location using Beacons within a store, shopping centre, event, or city location, and then communicate with that customer while they are on the move.^[12]

Personalization

With SmartFocus brands can automatically tailor their website or in store experience to the needs of the customer visiting in that exact moment. Using unique algorithms based on each customer’s preferences and behaviours, SmartFocus personalization starts to work right from the very first visit – meaning increased sales and loyalty.^[13]

Contextualization

SmartFocus’ contextualization solution enables brands to make every email, alert, push, and web visit hyper-aware of context, meaning every interaction with customers will be relevant in the moment. The Message Cloud delivers real-time mobile push notifications, tailored by customer segment and triggered by time or location. - whether the customer is at home, on a train, or in-store.^[14]

Email

SmartFocus delivers billions of highly personalized emails with content that adapts in real time, using what a brand knows about each of their customers - like their browsing behaviour, device, past purchases, or the weather in their area. Every email is personalized when the email is opened, not when it’s sent.^[15]

Predictive Marketing

With SmartFocus Predictive Marketing from The Message Cloud brands can truly understand their customers buying behaviour by integrating with existing ERP and other data sources to present app, customer, marketing, web, social, location-based and transaction data in one place.^[16]

Social Insights

Social insights from The Message Cloud enables brands to measure how effective their business is against competitors using a Social Index benchmark.It also identifies which products categories have the highest impact with the brands followers. ^[17]

Awards and Recognition

• EuroCloud France award for "Most Improved Financial Performance"^[18]
• Inc. Magazine's list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States 2011: ranked at #156 for software companies and #2018 overall based on a 126% growth rate over 3 years^[19]
• Software Magazine's 29th annual Software 500 “Leaders in Software/Services Revenue Growth ($30M to $100M)” 2011: Ranked #5 of the world's top 10 companies in the $50 – $100 Million range based on 43.1% growth from 2009–2010^[20]
• EuroSoftware100 2011: published by PricewaterhouseCoopers with Pierre Audoin Consultants in partnership with the French Association of Software Editors (AFDEL) and the European Software Association, Emailvision ranked^[21]
  • #1 on the list of top software companies in France (based on its 43.1% growth)
  • #1 among SaaS editors (by market share)
  • #4 for editors of CRM software (by market share)
  • #21 for worldwide sales performance (up from #34 in 2009 and #29 in 2010)
• Syntec Numerique (the French Professional Chamber for Digital Trade) and Ernst & Young "International Development" award 2011: the company was honored as the best-performing company in its category based on international growth^[22]
• Deloitte Technology Fast500 EMEA 2011: Ranked #480^[23]
• Truffle Capital "Truffle 100" List of the Top 100 European Software vendors 2010: Ranked #95 (based on 2009 revenues)^[24]
• The Good Web Guide: Business Website of the Year 2014^[25]
• Effective Mobile Marketing Awards: Most Effective Retail Campaign Or Solution 2014 (Highly Commended)^[26]

Partners

SmartFocus has established strategic alliances to increase the interoperability of its technology platform with CRM, ecommerce, Web analytics, and other complementary online marketing tools.

CRM providers:

• Salesforce.com
• Microsoft Dynamics
• Sugar CRM

eCommerce platform providers:

• Magento
• Digital River
• Demandware

Web analytics providers:

• Google Analytics
• Coremetrics
• litmus
• webtrends

Marketing software providers:

• SAP
• Return Path
• hybris

Locations

Office Locations:

• Belgium
• China
• France
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• Spain
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom
• United States

References

Further reading

External links

• SmartFocus Corporate Website