Omnichannel on a budget: Tagga releases web-social-mobile-email-SMS marketing platform

Everyone wants to go omnichannel. Even if they call multi-channel.

Vancouver-based Tagga, which started life as a marketing firm that enabled mobile marketing campaigns, is reinventing itself as a consumer marketing cross-channel campaign management platform.

(Try saying that three times twice.)

The big boys of omnichannel, of course, are the Salesforces and Adobe Marketing Clouds and Marketos of the world, with big solutions for big companies and big price tags. Tagga is one of many smaller companies and startups that are trying to enable similar customer experiences for smaller companies on much lower budgets.

The product is focused on a company’s community — the sum total of people who have purchased or indicated some level of interest in purchasing your products.

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Via the Tagga platform, co-founder and current CRO Amielle Lake says, companies will be able to track both campaign success and customer engagement right down to the individual level … for each of email, SMS, social engagement, and mobile engagement. In addition, with Tagga’s landing pages and microsites, companies can track engagement on their own websites as well.

All that individual-level data can be boiled down to a “Tout score,” the company says: a brand engagement version of a Klout score. Companies can use that score to plan campaigns and target cohorts.

While small — 20 employees, about $5 million in funding — the company has delivered campaigns for Red Bull, Citi, Adidas, and Paramount Pictures, among other well-known brands, and says its new engagement-focused marketing platform provides a single view of customers across all channels.

That’s a big promise.

Part of how Tagga plans to deliver on it is by keeping its platform open and extensible, ensuring that brands can integrate other components, including sales data, as they wish. This is important, since while Tagga has built and delivered an impressive platform for a company its size, there’s no way it’s going to be able to do everything you need for digital marketing, and it’s still probably best viewed as a marketing campaign tool that happens to have a significant platform component.

Early trials with four companies, including the mid-western retailer Gordmans, have resulted in “up to 4x click through rates on campaigns, and increases in sales of over 100 percent year over year,” Tagga says. And that, the company says, has driven ROMI (return on marketing investment) as high as 1600 percent.