MobileBeat: Call Loop soups up marketing campaigns for voice, text and email

Call Loop is one of 20 promising startups included in the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition and is in the running for one of two coveted Tesla Awards.

Referring to itself as “Constant Contact for voice and text,” mobile startup Call Loop allows marketers to tie together voice, text and email marketing messages into coherent, automated campaigns. The mission is to make life easier for marketers and make their messages more engaging for prospective recipients.

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Typically, when launching a marketing campaign, you would need to export your database of contacts, clean it up in Excel and import those you wanted into another system before even formulating your message. You would also have to start this process all over again every time new leads are generated — taking time and money.

Call Loop integrates with existing email autoresponder services like MailChimp, iContact, VerticalResponse, Infusionsoft and Constant Contact, among others, so that you can continually grow your list of email addresses and phone numbers across all of them. For example, you could send an email about a webinar on Monday, and follow up with a bulk voice or text message on Wednesday in two clicks, the company says.

“As a marketer trying to integrate text and voice into my marketing campaigns, I came across three glaring problems: it wasn’t automated, it was time-consuming, and there was no synchronization with my current email, CRM, or shopping cart systems,” says Call Loop co-founder Chris Brisson. “[With Call Loop], in less than five minutes, a user can synchronize with their existing email autoresponder system… to literally bolt on an automated, robust, multi-touch, multi-modality marketing campaign using voice, text and email.”

The company is targeting marketers, consultants, information publishers, agencies and businesses that are interested in capitalizing on mobile marketing but haven’t found a simple solution that can tie all facets of a campaign together.

“It’s no secret that you’re going to covert more prospects into buyers, increase sales and make more money using multiple modalities like email, video, voice, text, direct mail and other channels in one concentrated marketing campaign,” Brisson says.

Call Loop’s service is currently in private beta, prepping to go live in 30 to 60 days. In the meantime, it has also released its API, allowing third-party developers to build new applications and extensions on top of the Call Loop platform.

The startup is poised to compete with similar offerings from CallFire, Voiceshot, and Tatango. That said, Call Loop believes it has a jump on some of the more popular applications that could be used for marketing campaigns in the future.

“Companies like Foursquare, Gowalla and others steer toward attracting the smartphone users,” Brisson says. “But an astounding 68 percent of mobile subscribers never visit the internet on their mobile devices. SMS text messaging is on virtually every phone in the world and does not require internet access.”

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