$150M for Amplitude at a whopping $4b valuation
The martech and analytics space remains quite hot with the latest announcement by Amplitude of $150M in funding that quadrupled their valuation from their previous round last year: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-09/analytics-startup-amplitude-valued-at-4-billion-in-investment?sref=DJ6uFsR8 While the valuation looks a bit punchy, it definitely validates the Product Analytics space and we expect to see news from their key competitor Mixpanel on a new raise before long. Southeast Asia has been a bit behind the curve on adoption of Product Analytics tools as part of the Growth Stack, but that’s started to change in 2021 as more companies understand the power of enabling both product and marketing teams to access real-time insights into user behavior within their mobile apps.
Aftership’s $66M raise continues to prove the power of the Shopify ecosystem
Shopify is becoming a bit of a “kingmaker” these days – the SaaS products that do well on Shopify’s marketplace are all raising a lot of money and growing very quickly: https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/22/e-commerce-tracking-platform-aftership-raises-66m-led-by-tiger-global/ Ematic has partnered with Aftership and they’re listed in our marketplace too – since they don’t offer any local customer success or support (nor do they have a sales team) you can contact Ematic if you’re interested to try it out.
iOS 14.5 Attribution – SkAdNetwork
Prior to the release of iOS 14, Apple had release the SKAdNetwork 2.0 framework as its attribution solution which was no way close to being accurate. They’ve come a long way since that and it is becoming a more reliable framework for measurement, especially conversion. Most major publishers have already integrated with the SKAdNetwork (SKAN) to provide their customers with the metrics they need. What we’re seeing now is a definitely decline in revenue and conversion rates. It can be confusing to know whether a user didn’t engage with the ad because they didn’t consent to the advertiser’s app or just inaction, but SKAN gives you the data to attribute whether a user has converted from the ad or not. The one major impact that we are seeing is retargeting. It does look like retargeting is not possible with in the post iOS 14.5 period. A portion of the market has started spending more into the Android user base while reducing spend on iOS users which keeps the general revenue intact. At the same time, it would be wise to strategise on creating awareness with your users on why they should provide consent to your app. By building that trust, it would be possible to increase the opt-in rates. User Acquisition strategies, by and large, shouldn’t have any change. Looking at the data from SKAN, even though it is limited, would provide ideas on understanding which cohort is more willing to provide consent and which ones aren’t. At this point, hypothesizing and experimenting is the best way forward. Move fast, fail quickly and recover!
Campaign Monitor: A Premium yet Affordable Email Sending Platform
For marketers who just want a great email product and who don’t need a full cross-channel platform, we think Campaign Monitor is the best of breed. Also, because we’ve built a great partnership with them and have more than 100 customers on Campaign Monitor today, we can offer a customized pricing model that can be quite affordable for companies, particularly those who aren’t sending particularly high volumes of email. Some of the key reasons our customers like Campaign Monitor: Great design / templating features that are easy to use. Best-in-class segmentation, automation, and personalization features for a pure-play email platform. Deliverability: Campaign Monitor does human reviews for all customers on their platform to ensure their entire ecosystem is healthy, and this gives them the best deliverability among all email providers we work with. Solid Analytics offering compared to other email marketing products. Ematic also includes a generous amount of customer success support for all of our customers who buy Campaign Monitor via Ematic. If you are keen to find out more about Campaign Monitor and how Ematic can help, please contact us!
Looking to build a mobile growth stack?
This is a great primer from Yodel Mobile and our friends at Mixpanel: https://yodelmobile.com/app-launch-implement-mobile-tools/ If you’re looking for help building out your mobile growth stack, Ematic can help! We’ve got partnerships across the entire stack and local experts to help source the right solutions, implement, and get your organization going on a modern growth stack.
Understanding iOS 14.5
Quite the buzz going on about the iOS 14.5 update and its impact on mobile development and marketing. Took me a while to grasp what it actually means and the level of impact thus far. Primarily, Apple has released a version of iOS that requires explicit tracking consent from users. This affects marketers the most and in 2 ways: Source/Publisher App: Examples would be Facebook and Google which publish your ads Destination/Advertiser App: Brand owned app (ie) the destination from the ad to the final app which companies want their users to go to Users will need to provide consent on both these sets of apps to be able to get tracked. There have been several numbers published on what the early adoption of this looks like and although most of it is context sensitive to users belonging to their own app and versions of iOS, it is believed that the general adoption of iOS 14.5 has been lower than what Apple sees in its first month after a new version is released. Having said that, it is still early days and it is expected that the opt-in consent will increase in time. Look out for my next post on how to retrieve data for this new version and what apple has in stock. Did you know the iOS 14.6 release is not too far and has a lot of changes too?
Klaviyo raises monster round ($320M), valued at $9.5b
Well, Klaviyo once again has proven the old axiom: Email Marketing is dead. https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/klaviyo-series-d/ That comes hot on the heels of a $200M Series C in November when Ematic Solutions first partnered with them. We think it’s a fantastic product if you’re using an ecommerce platform like Shopify or Big Commerce, but unfortunately most companies in Asia still haven’t adopted modern ecommerce platforms due to the high transactional costs, limitations on payment options, and lack of O2O capabilities. Klaviyo can be used with any ecommerce platform though, even home brew solutions. Ematic can help.
Iterable update: co-founder takes over as CEO
This is good to see: https://iterable.com/blog/andrew-boni-focusing-on-the-future-together/ Looks like Andrew is a co-founder and has been with Iterable since the beginning (8 years+) so that should bring stability following the recent departure of the previous CEO.
Klaviyo lining up to take Bronto customers
After Oracle Netsuite announced the pending demise of Bronto (aside: never name technology after dinosaurs…) Klaviyo is positioning themselves as a good alternative for existing Bronto users: https://www.klaviyo.com/blog/bronto-migration We only ever encountered two Bronto users in 8 years at Ematic, but one of them (Grana) obviously agreed with that recommendation and made the move to Klaviyo nearly four years ago and are still using Klaviyo today, meaning it must have been a good move for them. The other Bronto user we met (Glasses Global) went out of business in 2016…they rode the dinosaur too long and it was too late. If there are any other Bronto users looking to move to Klaviyo (or anything else) give us a shout!
