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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.

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Zippin Walk-Up offers accessible way to deploy checkout-free locations with no CapEx

Zippin has launched Zippin Walk-Up which allows food and beverage counters to turn into checkout-free locations without changing the equipment already in place.

The company says that minimal construction is required, and existing stands can be converted in just days. An all inclusive monthly subscription starts at under $4,000 with no upfront CapEx.

Zippin says: “We’ve launched 83 stores to date and our customers are experiencing the significant business benefits that come with the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of checkout-free.”

“These include revenue increases of up to 78%, per-caps increases of over 60%, and average check sizes going up by 15%. With Zippin Walk-Up, all these benefits can be achieved with a lower upfront investment, faster deployment, and no CapEx requirements.”

It continues: “Our goal is to enable forward thinking businesses to invest in the technology that’s best for their customers and begin seeing results immediately.”

“The speed that Zippin Walk-Up offers retailers opens up new verticals wanting to deploy frictionless shopping in more spaces: truck stops, food courts, campus dining, stadiums, and more, can go fully frictionless with Zippin Walk-Up.”

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WISY PLATFORMS: BRINGING VISIBILITY TO PRODUCT AVAILABILITY IN CPG RETAIL

Wisy Platforms is building a predictive, decision-analytics retail operations and execution platform to help retailers solve and overcome the product availability challenges that they have lived with until now.

Using Wisy;

  • Employees performing visual inspection of retail shelves experience an improvement in the amount of time they would otherwise spend doing this task. Practically speaking this is a reduction from 20 minutes of work doing manual inspections to no more than 1 or 2 minutes using Wisy’s AI-enabled platform.

  • Retailers, CPG manufacturers and brokers experience a 90% or higher improvement in the accuracy of data about product availability on store shelves, and

  • Retailers, CPG manufacturers and brokers experience revenue gains of between 3% and 10%.

In addition to bringing visibility to Product Availability, Wisy also offers the following:

  • Price checks,

  • Real-time share-of-shelf KPIs,

  • Planogram compliance checks, and

  • Competitive intelligence: Wisy detects known or unknown competitors’ products on the shelves and transforms the data into business intelligence. This is particularly useful for addressing an industry trend where new niche brands gain market share at a much faster rate than established brands. Wisy provides alerts when new competitors come into a category and keeps track of their growth over time and per location.

Wisy is currently working on real-time object tracking using the video mode on mobile phones. This feature makes it easier for users to capture large shelves without the need to take many pictures. Wisy is also developing predictive analytics to optimize product assortment and basket analysis.

The platform enables CPG retailers, manufacturers, suppliers,wholesalers and brokers to make better strategic, tactical, and operational decisions by decreasing the complexity of the systems they have to interact with while introducing simplicity and convenience into their workflows. Employees just have to be able to take pictures or videos of retail store shelves using any mid-range smartphone.

Wisy’s breakthrough is in its ability to instantaneously run all its analytics processes and algorithms on an employee’s mobile device without the need for an always-on internet connection.

Incumbent solutions are complex, difficult, slow, cumbersome, and impractical for the fast pace at which retail execution must move. Most incumbent solutions require a high speed internet connection in order to produce results.

Wisy is lightweight, portable, simple, fast, and affordable. Anyone who can use a smartphone camera can be trained to use Wisy to perform retail operations tasks. The platform works for large multinational CPGs and retail chains, and for smaller CPGs, retail stores and brokers. It works on a stand-alone basis. But, it can also be with retail execution systems, ERP systems, retail data clouds, retail analytics systems and so on. It can be integrated into a retailer, manufacturer or broker’s existing systems – for example, customers of SAP can find Wisy in the SAP App Center.

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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.

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.

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