Customer loyalty platform Retention Science raises $7M

The Santa Monica-based Retention Science helps online commerce companies maximize customer retention and loyalty. The company aggregates customer demographic data, on-site behavioral data, historical/sales data, and social data to predict the best course of action to take in order to re-engage a customer. Some of the customer behaviors it monitors include time spent on the site, browsing pattern, abandoned cart items, and more.

"We enable retailers to create dynamic one-to-one communication by leveraging different data points to understand exactly what the customer profiles look like," Jerry Jao, CEO of Retention Science, explained to me in an interview. "We recommend the best timing of engagement, product promotions and content creatives to help make the communication and experience relevant to existing customers. As a result, they are better communicated and engaged."

For example, a  marketing managers might use Retention Science's marketing platform to optimize, schedule and manage their marketing campaigns across mobile, email and on-site display. They can track the results of their campaigns, optimize and A/B test marketing campaigns. 

While there are others in this space going after the same market, including AgilOne, Windsor Circle and Custora, what separates Retention Science is what it does with the data it collects.

"We focus on turning data into actionable insights. We are not an analytics company that just displays charts and analytics, we focus on generating campaign recommendations based on our proprietary predictive algorithms which learns across all industries," Jao said.

The company has collected over 65 million profiles and "learned from their user actions and we believe that 'data network effect' gives us a competitive advantage."

In addition, he pointed to the fact that Retention Science aggregates 3rd party data sources, such as Census Bureau demographic data and social data.