After two years of technology research, Chris Raniere, founder and CEO of Revcube, believes his company has finally come up with the future of integrated online marketing.
Revcube’s flagship customer acquisition product automates and optimizes marketing campaigns across banner advertising, paid search, e-mail and all other digital marketing channels. Its proprietary algorithms automate online communications across these platforms and serve a customized landing page to each customer based on meta data previously collected across channels.
“Integrating campaign efforts across channels has always been difficult offline,” Mr. Raniere said. “The digital medium is optimal for doing that but the industry up until now has been stuck in a silo approach.”
Revcube’s approach begins with an effort to collect more information on each channel’s activities and the performance of each customized landing page. The company does business with enterprise-sized marketers as the approach only works with a significant amount of data.
The tool’s interface allows marketers to simultaneously test time-of-day, gender, age, geographic targeting and other variables. Results of the online tests are interpreted every 30 seconds. However, Mr. Raniere estimated that it takes 100 conversions each day for a week to make the data statistically significant.
“We aren’t taking the place of the marketer,” Mr. Raniere said. “We don’t want to stop testing. We just want to remove the tedious manual data collecting and inefficiencies that exist in the current state of online marketing.”
Revcube does not have its own CRM platform but integrates with third-party providers or in-house databases. It uses its algorithms to calculate lifetime value of an acquisition based on collected data from its sources as well as a third-party data source.
The company plans to charge marketers a flat fee for the software. Mr. Raniere said the pay-per model, while extremely successful online, had removed control and transparency in marketers’ decision-making ability.
“CPA takes risk away but completely blinds you,” he said.
Revcube ran beta tests and pilot programs with several companies including LiveCareer, e-music, LeadGeneration and HomeGain.
Real estate company HomeGain used the platform to test banner creative, landing pages and traffic pathways. The company uses online marketing to drive qualified traffic to its Web site, ultimately connecting homebuyers and sellers with real estate agents.
“By using Revcube’s platform, HomeGain found new ways to target consumers who are ready to transact,” said Marie Nilsson, director of business development at HomeGain.
“We learned that our consumers respond to advertisements differently depending on their location, gender, time of day, seasonality, etc.,” she said. “Revcube helped us spot these differences and did an excellent job at optimizing the campaigns accordingly.”
Ms. Nilsson said that the real estate industry was increasingly using online tactics.
“The migration from offline to online advertising in the real estate space is happening much slower than for other categories,” Ms. Nilsson said.
“The vast majority of real estate advertising dollars are still spent offline,” she said. “As these dollars migrate online, the competition and price of online marketing increases, which puts pressure on us to innovate and evolve our marketing efforts.”
RevCube currently offers professional services that help companies interpret the data. However, ultimately it is a software company with products designed for marketing departments to use without outside consultation.
“We want to alleviate everyone out of the weeds,” Mr. Raniere said. “This takes a person from a tactical level to take C-level decisions.”
