One of the most complete and comprehensive platforms on the market, with over 150 features and various analytics tools combined with advanced segmentation and engagement processes.
In recent years, mobile phones have come to play an increasingly important role in our lives, with smartphones leading the way. As a direct consequence, the explosion of mobile commerce has been a major phenomenon, requiring brands to invest massively in these platforms. Having previously been focused on responsive web design, this investment has gradually been extended to mobile and web applications. According to a Criteo study published on 24 December 2018, mobile transactions accounted for 40% of e-commerce sales in North America in Q3 2018. And the key finding was that the conversion rate on shopping apps in the region was more than three times greater than the rate for mobile sites.
The next generation of mobile marketing
In 2012, Samir Addamine, then CEO of the interactive mobile agency ClicMobile, began to focus his attention on this trend as he saw more and more of his customers getting into mobile. At the time, the field of mobile analytics was still relatively unexplored and Samir Addamine carved out a niche for himself by creating FollowAnalytics in 2013. A next generation mobile marketing automation platform, combined with an engagement tracking dimension and, more recently, mobile app development features. The business started with a team in Paris in 2014 and the product soon generated a lot of interest, registering a dozen customers in the space of just a few months. By late 2015, the company completed its first round of financing of $12 million, primarily from North American investors including Salesforce Ventures and SAP Ventures. With this financial support, FollowAnalytics enriched its application suite and expanded its activities on the US market, where the start-up signed a partnership agreement with Salesforce to distribute its product. By the end of 2017, the company had successfully raised a further $11 million in a Series B financing, with a group of investors that included Orange Digital Ventures.
One of the most advanced platforms on the market
Hosted on Amazon Web Services’ Cloud and available in SaaS mode, the FollowAnalytics platform is one of the most comprehensive and mature on the market. In 2018, the start-up was featured in the prestigious ‘Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms’ report, where it was lauded as one of the most promising challengers in this field. Its product, which is geared to optimising engagement and retention among users, stands out from the competition in several ways, in particular for its quality. Delivered in the form of an SDK that can be integrated with any mobile app and providing access to some 50 metrics in just a few hours, the platform offers more than 150 features. It includes mobile/user/attribution/crash analytics and sophisticated segmentation tools, and is combined with real-time engagement technology supported by machine learning algorithms. It allows retailers to refine and personalise their communications to customers with a view to ensuring engagement and retention, whether it is a transactional or contextual push.
A package of value-added solutions
In addition to its capabilities and extensive functional scope, the product bases its added value on other essential building blocks. “It can be integrated with the leading CRM platforms on the market, including Salesforce, via integrated connectors that ensure immediate consistency with customers’ systems,” says Samir Addamine. “It stands to reason that we were, therefore, interested from a very early stage in the issues of personal data protection and GDPR compliance. As such, FollowAnalytics has adopted the principles of privacy by design since 2016. And we provide customers with a ‘DataWallet’ to help them to manage their personal data and monitor and ensure their own compliance.”
Finally, in 2018, FollowAnalytics launched a disruptive mobile app development solution under the name ‘Build’. It is disruptive because it allows apps to be created in just a few hours using existing web platforms, in a no-code configuration and offers several additional benefits: accelerated time to market, reduced costs, increased ROI. Already marketed by Salesforce in the US, this product is expected to be launched in France shortly, in partnership with Orange Applications for Business. Just one of the many innovations presented during live demos at the VivaTech show!
