‘Radically simple’ TriggerMail nabs $6M, changes name, imagines bigger

It may be practically an antique channel, but automated email marketing is still highly effective. It can also be an involved process.

New York City-based TriggerMail has focused on streamlining the process of setting up emails that are sent in response to some condition, and today is a big day in the company’s history. It is announcing a $6 million Series A round of funding, a name change, and a transition to something bigger.

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The new company name, Bluecore, is intended to show that the company is moving beyond triggered email, CEO and cofounder Fayez Mohamood told VentureBeat.

“Think of the automated email space,” he said. “It’s hard to set up [personalized] automated emails with, say, [Salesforce’s] ExactTarget.” Instead, Bluecore offers what it calls “radically simple integration.”

With a triggered email, for instance, a logged-in visitor — who has previously supplied an email address to a site — can be sent a customized email about a new discount on kids’ clothing the day after she has browsed that section in a site. The trigger for a followup email about a sale on perfumes could also be, say, a search for perfumes on a site.

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Founded in 2013, Bluecore specializes in providing triggered emails for catalog-based retailers. Ecommerce sites just have to insert a line of Javascript, Mohamood said, while more traditional email automation tools require trigger definitions, data feeds, discussions about special conditions like when a product goes out of stock, and so on.

This integration with traditional email automation systems is often customized to the specific retailer, whereas Bluecore is purpose-built for any retailer with a product catalog. The company says it can set up a retailer’s triggered emails in anywhere from a few days to a month, compared to the six months that it says an ExactTarget would require.

“We are configurable out of the box,” Mohamood said, offering a dashboard and a client services team for quick setups. Customer profiles are built on the fly in the Bluecore system, but a retailer can also add profile data from, say, a customer relationship management system.

“Stop integrating, start marketing” is its slogan.

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The company launched its platform in January 2014 with five client retailers, and it finished the year with around 50 customers representing about 70 brands. The new funding, from FirstMark Capital, will be used to scale the platform for the largest retailers and expand key teams like engineering, sales, marketing, and client success.

Now, the company is looking to expand on its specialized approach to the needs of catalog-based retailers.

“Our entry point was email,” Mohamood told us, “but we can understand the catalog of any retailer.”

But where will the newly labeled company take its approach?

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Bluecore is only saying it expects to make some more announcements within a few months.