Customer engagement startup MessageGears LLC today announced that it has secured a $62 million funding round led by Long Ridge Equity Partners.

Argentum Group and Atlanta Ventures participated as well. Since launching in 2011, MessageGears has raised a total of $80 million from investors. 

Atlanta-based MessageGears provides a platform that brands use to send marketing emails, text messages and push notifications to customers. The platform makes it possible to personalize each promotion according to customer preferences. MessageGears says its installed base includes T-Mobile, Expedia Group Inc. and other major brands. 

As part of its platform, MessageGears offers an audience segmentation tool that can help marketers find consumers with similar shopping preferences. A retailer, for example, could use the tool to determine how many customers buy a certain product on a regular basis. The retailer’s marketing team can then target those users with a personalized promotion to encourage more repeat purchases.

MessageGears’ platform enables marketers to customize the design of promotional emails without writing code. Developers, in turn, can create workflows to automatically customize each promotion based on customer preferences. MessageGears retrieves data about customer preferences from a company’s internal systems and uses the data to personalize marketing campaigns.

The company says it processes customer data with a different approach than competing offerings. The result, it adds, is that its platform is easier to use and requires less storage infrastructure.

Marketing automation platforms such as MessageGears generate personalized promotions using a brand’s internal customer data. Often, the format of that customer data has to be changed before processing can begin. MessageGears says its platform removes the need to manually change how a brand’s information is stored, which can potentially save a significant amount of manual work. 

The platform is designed to run alongside a company’s existing cloud-based analytics environment. It can be integrated with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift and Google Cloud’s BigQuery. Besides removing the need to change the format of a company’s marketing records, the company says, its platform can also reduce hardware requirements by making more efficient use of data storage space than competing offerings.

“Over the next few years, we are going to see a continuing wave of enterprise B2C brands investing in moving their first-party customer data to a modern data warehouse like Snowflake and AWS,” said Chief Executive Officer Roger Barnette. “MessageGears is the only platform that can help those marketers capitalize on that investment and fully use their data in their customer engagement programs.”

The company will use its newly closed $62 million funding round to develop more features. Additionally, it plans to grow its international presence and explore potential acquisitions. 

Image: MessageGears