Retention Science Launches 'Big Data' Retention-Marketing Platform for E-commerce Businesses

Start-up company secures $1.3 million in seed funding from MuckerLab and addresses higher costs of customer acquisition versus retention

Santa Monica, Calif.—July 18, 2012—Big data retention marketing platform Retention Science, launched today, provides e-commerce businesses with actionable data analytics tools to cost-effectively prevent customer churn and encourage reengagement. Additionally, it received $1.3 million in seed funding from the MuckerLab accelerator program.

“Our platform enables e-Commerce businesses to reengage the right customers with the optimal offers at the optimal time,” said Jerry Jao, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Retention Science. “Some of the biggest e-commerce players are seeing substantial rewards after they made investments in retention marketing and big data analytics. It’s so important because of the 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of a company’s future profits are coming from 20 percent of the existing customers. We are meeting the mid-market demand for a customer retention platform that can drive tremendous growth in existing customer spending.”

Co-founding Retention Science together with current company Chief Technology Officer Andrew Waage, Jao and Waage desired to use their expertise in e-commerce to build a retention platform that produced real results. Retention Science increased sales by more than 133 percent during its closed beta; has already signed up name brands; and is revenue-generating.

For marketers, customer acquisition often receives more attention and investment than customer retention, even though it costs several times more to obtain a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Retention Science fulfills this oversight through its customer profiling engine which uses algorithms and statistical modeling to build custom retention optimization strategies. The platform reactivates customers before they churn to a competitor or simply lose interest in the company’s products or services. Analytics are performed in real-time to ensure up-to-date customer behavior predictions.

The company also features intelligent offers, where it collects customer demographic, social and behavioral data and unites them with real-time Web viewing patterns and purchase history to predict the most relevant campaigns and dynamically create offers based on customer unique characteristics. It allows e-commerce companies to optimize their broader profit margins based on individual preferences and sensitivity to pricing.

The $1.3 million seed round comes from multiple sources including Baroda Ventures; Mohr Davidow Ventures; Double M Partners; Bong Koh (Lifecrowd); Clark Landry (GraphEffect); Kunal Anand (BBC; MySpace; Gravity); Mike Greenfield (Circle of Moms); Paige Craig (Forbes Top 10 Angel); as well as several Stanford Ph.D. data scientists from companies including LinkedIn, PayPal and IBM.

“Customer acquisition is often expensive and companies that don’t work towards retaining those earned customers are wasting dollars,” said William Hsu, Co-founder, MuckerLab. “Retention Science offers the big data-driven math to detect when customers are at the ‘lapse’ point in their individual lifecycle. Such data allows businesses to proactively reach out to reassert customer engagement with their brand for eventual sales. With a sound strategy and experienced management team, we foresee considerable interest in their services across multiple ecommerce players.”

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