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SAP Startup Spotlight Series: Mention Me

In this installment of e3zine’s SAP Startup Spotlight Series, we’ll be taking a look at Mention Me, a referral engineering platform which integrates first-party advocacy data directly into your SAP ecosystem.

Kat Wray is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Mention Me. As Director of Strategic Partnerships, Kat oversees the SaaS company’s strategic partnerships, working with leading partners to identify opportunities to accelerate growth for their customer base of over 600 clients. With a career spanning sales, business development, and partnerships, Kat has honed deep expertise into how brands can harness the power of customer advocacy to exponentially grow their business.

1. What is Mention Me and what do you offer?

Mention Me empowers businesses to turn word of mouth and brand advocacy into an unstoppable driver of sustainable, organic growth. Using cutting-edge technology and expertise gathered over 10 years in referral marketing, we’ve built the world’s first Advocacy Intelligence Platform that identifies, recruits, nurtures, and activates loyal brand fans. Established in the UK with offices in London and Boston, we’ve so far delivered more than 1.8 bn USD in revenue for 500 brands globally, including ASOS, PUMA, Charlotte Tilbury, ManyPets, and Nutmeg.

2. How does your solution work?

While your fans have always been the most authentic and trusted promoters of your brand, until now it wasn’t possible to harness their potential. And so while they were busy recommending your brand and products in the background, you weren’t able to target, nurture or reward them so they advocate more often and more loudly with everyone they meet. For the first time, Mention Me’s Advocacy Intelligence Platform and technology changes that.

3. Do customers need special technology/devices to access your service?

In order to track earned acquisition and gather the first-party data required to fuel the Advocacy Intelligence Platform, you’ll need to deploy a high-quality referral program with Mention Me.

Mention Me’s Advocacy Intelligence Platform integrates first-party advocacy data directly into your marketing automation and personalization platforms (including, of course, Emarsys and SAP). Aside from integrating our platform into your martech infrastructure, no special devices or tech is required.

4. Why do you believe thinking advocacy-first is so important for brands in 2023?

Business reliance on digital marketing today is at an all-time high. In the US, Google, Meta and Amazon now account for 64% of all ad spend. Meanwhile, acquisition costs are rising, iOS changes are ramping up the pressure, and we’re in an economic downturn. All that makes it no easy feat to acquire high-quality customers.

Winning in the times ahead requires a different approach: earning growth instead of paying for it. By taking an advocacy-first approach that prioritizes your existing customers—and delighting them enough to share your brand with friends and family—you’ll drive organic, sustainable growth without busting your marketing budget.

5. How are you connected to SAP? Can your solution be integrated in SAP systems and if so, how?

Integrated with Emarsys, Commerce Cloud, and CDP, Mention Me delivers the best Advocacy Solution for the SAP CX portfolio. Our solution equips brands to leverage referral as a sustainable growth channel while gathering rich first-party data that enhances performance across marketing channels. These unique advocacy insights integrate across the martech stack, enabling brands to identify current and future advocates and serve personalized omnichannel experiences that keep customers coming back, spending more, and bringing their friends.

6. How has SAP.iO’s involvement impacted your journey?

With SAP.iO, we’re maximizing the joint value we’re delivering to clients, while educating more CRM and CX leaders on the power of brand advocacy. Looking ahead, we’re excited to build on the success we’ve achieved so far as a recently appointed SAP Spotlight partner.

The Single Most Important Ingredient For Effective Digital Marketing

Be honest, to find the product you’re looking for, would you rather scroll through thousands of images and lines of text or take a fun personality quiz? If you’re as curious and competitive as most people are, you’ll click on the quiz because everyone loves personalized experiences. In fact, startup Jebbit is counting on it. This cloud-based platform helps digital marketers create interactive content to keep customers interested and spark sales.

“We’re seeing the emergence of a fluid customer journey that flattens the marketing funnel and puts control in the hands of the consumer,” said Tom Coburn, CEO and co-founder of Jebbit. “Using our platform, brand marketers are providing a relevant and personalized experience that guides the consumer to the path of purchase. By asking people about their preferences, interests, and motivations, brands generate high-quality leads and increased sales.”

Jebbit’s clients are primarily consumer brands in sectors such as CPG, retail, financial services, travel, quick service restaurants, and media and entertainment. Companies typically grow lead capture rates by 30% to 50%. Brand websites have expanded sales between 10% to 30%.

“One running shoe company used a personality quiz to find out about the exercise habits of customers as they joined the loyalty program,” said Coburn. “It’s a consumer-friendly way to welcome people and get to know them instead of an impersonal email.”

On average, brands see an 85% completion rate for every experience.

SAP Startup Spotlight: Footprint Technologies

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Footprint Technologies, which has an app listed in the SAP store.

Matthias Brendel’s is the CEO and co-founder of Footprint Technologies. He founded his first company at the age of 17 and has been working as a “sidepreneur” ever since. After finishing his degree in environmental engineering, Brendel became interested in reducing carbon emissions in combustion engines and joined Audi in 2007. He later had the opportunity to create and lead an innovation unit for new business development in Berlin’s startup ecosystem from scratch: Audi Denkwerkstatt. In November 2020, he joined his early-stage start-up, Footprint Technologies. Since then, he has contributed to the transformation of online shoe shopping into a more individual and sustainable experience. In this interview, he mentions what Footprint Technologies has to offer, how his solution works, and what’s next for the startup.

What is Footprint Technologies and what do you offer?

Footprint Technologies transforms online shoe shopping into a sustainable and individual experience: our software enables online shoppers to precisely measure their feet via smartphone and receive our perfect size and fit recommendation for the selected shoe model. The whole process is seamlessly integrated into their shopping experience: it starts directly in their favorite shop and ends up with the perfectly fitting shoe in the shopping cart. Thus we are avoiding shoe returns for a more profitable and sustainable e-commerce. Our team is based in Berlin, Germany but serves clients from all over Europe, Japan, and the USA.

How does your solution work?

Our software enables people to measure their feet easily with their smartphone and a standard sheet of paper (DIN A4 or US Letter). Using the latest cloud-based computer vision technology, we can determine the length and width of the foot to the millimeter. But measuring the exact foot size is only half the solution. In order to give the best possible size recommendation for the chosen model, we use our unique shoe database. In cooperation with the shoe manufacturers, we have identified and stored the relevant size and fit information for each shoe model here. Knowing feet and shoe dimensions and integrating the latest scientific research from University of Gothenburg Sweden, we recommend a comfortable fit that makes the user happy and prevents returns.

Yellow.ai recognized as a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms

Yellow.ai, a leading enterprise-grade Conversational AI platform, today announced it has been recognized as a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. Recognized as a Niche Player in 2022, Yellow.ai’s recognition as a Challenger in this year’s report is based on the evaluation of its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

Yellow.ai’s Dynamic AI agents handle over 2 billion interactions every quarter, automating customer and employee experiences across 35+ channels and 135+ languages on voice and chat. Yellow.ai’s Dynamic Automation Platform (DAP), powered by generative AI, enables businesses to reduce expenses by 60% and is complemented by a suite of solutions, including the recently launched Dynamic Conversation Designer, Yellow.ai Marketplace, Customer Data Platform (CDP) Engage, and Omnichannel Agent Assist Platform.

“We’re humbled to have been recognized as a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. We believe this recognition is a testament to the strength of our platform capabilities. We think our improvement from a Niche Player to a Challenger underlines our dedication to delivering cutting-edge solutions to our customers. Over the past year, we launched several cutting-edge products, including our proprietary DynamicNLP™, significantly improving time-to-market and ease of use for our customers while reducing their operational costs,” said Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and Co-founder, Yellow.ai.

SundaySky Video Experience Creator Now Available on SAP® Store

SundaySky video platform delivers 20-30% engagement improvement, deepens customer relationships through integration with SAP Commerce Cloud

SundaySky, an SAP^® silver partner and leader in video experiences, announced that the SundaySky Video Experience Creator is now available on SAP Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Customers using SundaySky can now accelerate video content velocity, as well as deploy data-driven contextual and relevant experiences on SAP Commerce Cloud sites and via email to outperform acquisition, retargeting, upsell, and loyalty goals. The SundaySky Video Platform is fully integrated with the SAP Commerce Cloud solution. Additionally, data from SAP Customer Data Cloud or core data services can be leveraged for video personalization with SundaySky’s native data connectors.

SAP Store, found at store.sap.com, delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying and renewing more than 1,800 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated solutions they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made through SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.

Conga Acquires Contract Wrangler

Conga, the global leader in Commercial and Revenue Operations transformation, today announced the acquisition of Contract Wrangler, a leader in applying AI and ML to understand the terms and obligations in contracts that impact revenue, risk and cost once the contract is executed. With the combination, companies of all sizes will be able to holistically manage all of their contracts, whether on the company’s or third-party paper, to manage risk while optimizing revenues.

Drive Meaningful Consumer Engagement with SundaySky

It’s official: Brands who do not incorporate real-time content rendering will be left in the dust. Today, digital is no longer a “nice-to-have,” but critical to a company’s success. As more and more brands turn to video as a means to connect with consumers, they are realizing how difficult and costly it is to create and maintain engaging and scalable video experiences as well as measure their impact.

Enter SundaySky.

SundaySky built a real-time content rendering engine in the cloud with infinite scale that intelligently versions video relevant to each individual viewer, activated by optional data. SundaySky empowers brands to deliver video experiences at critical moments along customer journeys in order to engage, educate, and inspire.

Rethinking Video

Whether operating in CPG and retail, or insurance and telecommunications industries, SundaySky gives marketers and CX business leaders the tools to simply drag and drop creative assets into video templates order to weave together a beautifully branded, relevant video. Users can build their own experiences from scratch and get inspired by existing industry templates with SundaySky’s easy-to-use modules, no video or after-effects experience needed. After the video is created, users can deploy the experience on commerce sites and distribute through email and mobile apps.

Harness the power of brand enthusiasm among your consumers with Mention Me

Today, when consumers are looking to make a purchase, social proof is king. Recommendations from friends (and even strangers — think influencers!) are key in creating consumer trust and influencing a consumer’s decision to buy. While more and more brands are experimenting with referral marketing, many find themselves locked in to simple referral systems that do not deliver. Looking for a referral marketing platform where brands can turn their customers into their most powerful marketers? Enter Mention Me.

The power of a referral

Mention Me creates a deeply data-driven program based on the context and behavior of buyers, helping brands identify each customer’s likelihood to refer, and at which point in the lifecycle referral is most likely to succeed. How does it work? Referral programs incentivize existing customers (referrers) to introduce a brand to their friends (referees). Ultimately, everyone wins: Rewards (think discount or free gift) are given to referrers for successful introductions that convert new customers, and are also given to referees when they make their first purchase. Mention Me’s Referral Engineering™ outperforms ‘simple’ referral systems, increasing customer acquisition by up to a third. The proof is in the pudding: Mention Me has delivered over $1 billion in revenue for clients, and over 22 million customers have shared their referral programs.

Capture 1st Party Data at Scale with Jebbit

With the fierce competition to capture consumers’ attention that is only heating up, brands are desperately searching for ways to successfully interact with and convert consumers. With the endless amount of digital noise, brands are struggling to communicate authentically with their target audience and get the insights they need. The solution? Jebbit!

Which herbal shampoo is right for you?

Jebbit helps companies create all different kinds of interactive experiences without needing to touch a line of code. Whether it be a product match or a trivia game, these creative experiences get consumers to interact and answer questions in a way that is much more engaging than a typical survey. The average Jebbit experience sees an 85% completion rate, and takes a consumer two minutes to complete: these are two minutes where the brand has the undivided attention of the consumer, and is able to capture essential first party, self-declared data.

Taking control of how CPGs engage with consumers

Most of Jebbit’s customers are large enterprise brands in CPG, eCommerce, travel or the entertainment space. When brands consider working with Jebbit, they have often already built some kind of quiz, whether in-house or with an agency, and have begun dealing with how costly and time intensive it is to keep the experience maintained and optimized. By working with Jebbit, brands can take control of the experiences, and build and edit them in real-time. Brands who have run traditional surveys in the past view Jebbit as a way to create something much more engaging to the consumer, and in parallel, can use Jebbit data to validate market research, optimize marketing campaigns in real-time, and build audiences for personalized retargeting.

MarTech Interview with Jim Dicso, CEO at SundaySky

In order to ensure that video marketing efforts are optimized with measurable ROI processes, marketers need to keep a few things in mind; Jim Dicso, CEO at SundaySky has some tips:

Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Jim, can you tell us more about SundaySky and your role as CEO?

SundaySky helps companies of all sizes deliver video-powered experiences (VX) that deepen engagement, inspiring customers to take actions that are both valuable to them and impactful for the brand.

Customer engagement has always interested me. I spent the majority of my career in sales and sales leadership roles, specifically in the software industry. Previously I was EVP of sales and services for a SaaS provider of real-time online customer engagement solutions. I joined SundaySky a decade ago as president and chief revenue officer and handled all market-facing activity. Then, in 2017, our co-founder and CEO, Shmulik Weller, moved into the role of chief product officer and I was named CEO.

How are you seeing marketing and sales teams today use video more proactively to create better prospects and customer engagement? Can you highlight examples of some successful campaigns in both B2B and B2C?

We have case studies covering a wide variety of applications across the customer journey both in B2B and B2C.

In B2C, SelectBlinds uses VX via paid media to acquire new customers, as well as in emails following initial trials to drive sales. The content of the videos focus on guiding consumers on how to measure and self-install window treatments, which are common friction points on the path to purchase. The results of these certain campaigns can speak for themselves: the holistic lifecycle-focused programs earned a 37% lift in email conversions and a 20% above-average order value increase.

eTrade delivers VX through email and portal placement during critical moments in customer journeys including onboarding new account holders with details on how to easily leverage their trading platform. The company’s initiatives have led to increased funding rates and a lift in average annualized revenue for the business.

Another household name, Bank of America, delivers compelling individualized VX through email, portal and chatbot, providing Preferred Rewards members with the status of their accrued benefits and additional ones available through greater product use. This strategy during moments of uncertainty has led to deeper customer relationships, as well as a sizable increase in product usage per customer.

Video is being used in B2B with great success, too. For example, Okta, an identity provider for the internet, uses VX to engage new customers (i.e. IT admins) and increase their understanding of its platform in order to increase usage and future revenue. Additionally, Terradatum, a market analytics platform that helps real estate brokers and agents, uses VX for agents and agencies to market their listings while marketing themselves.

Use the best content to sell your products and brands with eStoreMedia

Today, every brand needs to be an e-commerce All Star. The problem? Many brands don’t know how to play the game. From solving distribution problems, through optimizing content and in store search, monitoring pricing and promotions, to creating a ratings and reviews strategy, a long list of complex processes must be executed by brand teams just to keep their heads above water in the e-commerce world. Companies are struggling to fill the ever-present gaps in content, distribution, search, and ratings.

Looking to win on the digital shelf? Look no further than eStoreMedia.

Streamline. Automate. Thrive.

eStoreMedia provides a suite of automated, e-commerce tools that helps CPG brands optimize growth in online sales. The eStoreMedia suite is made up of two core products: eStoreContent and eStoreCheck. eStoreContent takes the product content from a brand’s database and delivers it to the product pages on each of the brand’s online retail channels via a syndication process. This streamlines complex content management processes; it expedites content implementation and maximizes content effectiveness by ensuring the best content is always deployed. Rich and relevant content improves conversion, which in turn is favoured by the e-retailer’s algorithm, making the product more findable, and sales accelerate accordingly.

eStoreCheck provides enhanced predictive analytics that measure a brand’s overall performance on the digital shelf including the performance and compliance of rich content as well as keywords in titles, descriptions and bullet points. It also checks other elements in store such as product availability, price and promotion, and overall category performance benchmarked against competitors, and buy box win/loss analysis. When eStoreCheck identifies a gap (a risk or opportunity), it creates a prioritized action list, enabling e-commerce teams to seize more sales opportunities. With both e-commerce analytics and e-content management, eStoreMedia’s comprehensive solution provides quick, automated content deployment across multiple online marketplaces and sites, and ensures that companies win over the shopper with the best content to sell their products and brands.

Top Reason Consumers Distrust A Brand? Asking For Too Much Information

As consumers spend more time online, the level of trust people have in brands has become closely linked to how brands use their personal data.

When it comes to communications that are mutually beneficial, Jebbit’s fifth bi-annual Consumer Data Trust Index found that interactive experiences such as product matches and personality quizzes take the cake, increasing consumer trust by 38.4 percent.

The report asked adult consumers in the US to rate, on a scale of one to 10, their level of trust in brands to use their personal data in exchange for relevant promotions, goods and services.

Over half (62 percent) of consumers said they prefer personalized products and experiences but a brand’s approach can make or break how that experience is received. For example, 54 percent of consumers said their trust in a brand decreases when receiving emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.

Interactive experiences are nearly tied with personalized emails (38.9 percent) based on knowingly shared data and are the least likely to decrease trust by far, according to the report. Such experiences provide both transparency about how consumer data is used and immediately deliver value on that data through personalized recommendations, notes Jebbit.

Creating a data collection strategy is critical, as 35 percent of consumers told Jebbit that a brand asking for too much personal information was their top reason to distrust a brand—the number one reason for the third time in a row. Jebbit clients have seen increases of over 30 percent in customer lifetime value by collecting as few as three points from each of their customers.

New SetSail Analysis Shows Micro-Incentives Combined With Actionable Data Are Key to Successful B2B Sales Cycle

–SetSail, the Revenue Execution platform for sales, releases new data on the anatomy of a successful B2B sales deal, derived from its analysis of deals at six large enterprises, including one of the Fortune 10, over the past two months. SetSail found sales reps are most effective when given data on the next best action in tandem with a micro-incentive (points that lead to prizes and rewards) to act. On average, if a sales rep takes action on five or more success indicators the deal win rate increases by 62%.

“Reps must be aware of the path to success and motivated to execute on multiple recommendations, focusing on the small wins that lead to big deals,” said Haggai Levi, SetSail CEO. “Micro-incentives accomplish this – they lay out success indicators and prompt reps to take action, making the difference between a deal closing and an indefinite sales cycle.”

As part of its analysis, SetSail broke down the three most important elements of a B2B deal: Buyer Persona (who the rep is contacting), Buyer Engagement (contact type and frequency) and Deal Progression Keywords (keywords discussed throughout the deal cycle) and the impact that micro-incentives play within them.

SetSail Debuts New AI-powered Solutions to Help Sales Teams Unlock More Revenue

SetSail, the AI-powered micro-incentives platform for sales, will unveiled multiple new product features on at the company’s first annual SetSail Voyage virtual conference. New SetSail features include a signal-based coaching app; smart milestone signals to help reps accelerate revenue; and data automation tailored to the way reps use their CRM.

The world of work has changed in the past year, and the ‘new normal’ requires a new way of selling,” said Haggai Levi, CEO of SetSail. “To be successful today, sales teams must embrace data, signals and storytelling. This is where SetSail comes in – providing sales teams with the information they need to take the small steps that lead to closing big deals.”

Founded in 2018 by former Google machine learning experts, SetSail uses AI to identify the buying signals needed to close a deal. The platform then converts these signals into recommendations for sales reps and presents them with micro-rewards (e.g. monetary rewards and recognitions) for following the best path of action and building good selling habits.