Iterable raises $8M to help marketers bridge the personalization gap

Iterable, the growth marketing and user engagement platform, today announced it has closed a series A round of funding led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from previous investors.

This latest round takes its total funding to $9.2 million, following a seed round in January 2015. The company was founded in 2013, and was a member of the Spring 2013 class at the AngelPad accelerator.

The investment comes at a time when personalization is on the lips of many marketers.

Our research shows clearly that personalization (especially in email marketing) has a high return on investment. On the downside, 80 percent of consumer-facing companies just don’t understand their customers beyond basic demographics and purchase history.

Bridging the gap between what marketers (and consumers) want and what they can deliver is an opportunity for the right vendor.

“We agree that most companies today aren’t personalizing messaging as nearly as much as they should,” Justin Zhu, cofounder and CEO at Iterable, told me.

“One area with a lot of untapped potential is in using deeper behavioral signals to personalize messages,” Zhu said. “We enable that today through segmentation and workflows that can easily take into account any user action or event.”

Today’s funding raise will go toward improving that functionality for Iterable customers.

Iterable lets marketers quickly segment hundreds of millions of users, personalize messages, build sophisticated behavioral workflows, and A/B split-test any aspect of a campaign. It doesn’t just support email, delivering campaigns across mobile push notifications, SMS, the Web, and social too — something it claims will aid the delivery of personalized messaging.

“Our data shows that sending a message via the right channel, or at the right time, for each user can have tremendous effects on engagement, even if the content is not actually personalized,” Zhu said.

With the new funds, Iterable intends to accelerate its growth, extend the functionality of its platform, and grow its team in order to serve enterprise customers, predominantly across the major B2C vertical markets.