To help Shopify shops keep in touch with consumers through SMS, Postscript notched $4.5 million in funding. Accomplice led the investment round, which was also backed by Wufoo Co-founder Kevin Hale and Kayak Co-founder Paul English, among others, according to reports.
The eCommerce companies that have a new product coming to market, and want to tell their most frequent shoppers about it first, can put a message onto the dashboard of Postscript. They can tell the program which customer segment should receive the message. In addition, the back-end analytics can show a company how many people received the message and clicked through, as well as how much revenue they took in from the clicks.
In the event of a customer response, those messages appear in the back end, similar to a support ticket. Employees and shop owners can answer questions, have direct conversations and close out tickets via the dashboard. They can also automatically send them into services, such as Zapier and Zendesk.
Postscript is designed to help eCommerce firms (as of now, specifically Shopify shops) connect with current shoppers through SMS. Its Shopify plugin allows store owners to run SMS marketing campaigns with customers who have chosen to opt in, have conversations with responding users and take a look at the data to see what works.
In separate news, reports surfaced over the summer that retail messaging startup Attentive notched $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia. Existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, NextView Ventures and Eniac Ventures — as well as new investors IVP and High Alpha — also participated in the funding round.
The funding will be used to continue to boost product innovation, as well as scale operations. Founded by Andrew Jones and Brian Long, Attentive’s first product enabled “two-tap” sign-up to let users tap on a promotion link from a website of a brand that opts them in for SMS messages from that retailer.
