Mobile customer engagement is a major piece of the customer loyalty puzzle today and Clutch, a customer management and marketing analytics company, acquired intelligent mobile promotions platform Persio to add powerful new mobile marketing capabilities to the Clutch platform.
The transaction places Clutch squarely in a position to capture a larger share of the $32 billion marketing technology industry, as brands are increasingly looking to automate mobile solutions to deliver shipping notices, rewards, coupons, brand messages, and more.
Clutch CEO Ned Moore explained to Loyalty360 the reasons behind the Persio acquisition.
“We’ve been looking to expand the mobile capabilities of the Clutch platform for some time now,” Moore said. “Aside from the major shifts in consumer behavior in favor of mobile, our clients have been asking us for more ways to reach their mobile consumers. Persio really stood out to us because it not only has built an advanced and highly scalable mobile platform, it views customer engagement in a similar way to how we see it. Both companies leverage customer data and insights to make meaningful connections with consumers, which is important in any situation, but especially when you are engaging with individuals on their personal devices. Going forward, we want our clients to use mobile messaging, app, and mobile web to complement their other channels, using the data and insights we provide to make the overall message more personal and effective.”
Moore said that the addition of Persio’s technology enables Clutch’s clients to create mobile messages that contain rich content such as images, videos, and long text, as well as fun, gamified offers like scratch & wins or sweepstakes.
“We can send content to retailers’ proprietary apps or mobile wallets,” Moore said. “We can also leverage the UI of the Persio platform, which lets the marketer actually create these offers in a really simple way with real-time preview. Part of our job here at Clutch is to be ahead of the curve and provide our clients with the best platform on the market. As such, we are constantly innovating and building and expanding what we do to help our clients' businesses grow. Persio has been doing the same thing in the mobile space. We knew that integrating their team and technology with ours would address the demand in the market for mobile while making us more competitive and more valuable as a business.”
With the acquisition of Persio, Moore said Clutch can offer more for brands that want to create more value for their customers.
“We are a single platform that can perform virtually every marketing activity, from integrating and analyzing data and using it to send marketing messages on all channels, to managing loyalty and gift programs,” Moore said. “Companies are continually looking to simplify their processes, bring things together, manage fewer vendors, and see their customers in a realistic way so they can market to them effectively. With the addition of Persio, our platform is much stronger and more versatile than ever before.”
Nick Doulas, the former CEO of Persio who has transitioned to SVP of Product in his role at Clutch, shared his thoughts on the acquisition to Loyalty360.
“The acquisition is an incredibly positive outcome for Persio,” Doulas said. “We’ll be able to do so much more for our clients, and our employees have the opportunity to integrate with a team that thinks about customer marketing in a very similar and complementary way. Going forward, Persio will be merged under the Clutch brand and we’ll be bringing the platforms together so clients can access everything from one place.”
Doulas said that Clutch’s platform has capabilities that will be “hugely advantageous to our clients.”
On the data side, Doulas noted, Clutch’s extensive integration network, segmentation engine, and third-party data augmentation capabilities will greatly enhance clients’ ability to understand their customers.
“On the deployment side, they’ll be able to automate and trigger communications on new channels such as direct mail and email, as well as mobile and the web,” Doulas added. “Another big asset is Clutch’s experience and ability to manage retention strategies like loyalty and gift programs in-house, and they’re made way more powerful when coupled with everything I just mentioned.”