For any business, nothing is more important than getting leads. But for small businesses focused on e-commerce, new leads can mean the difference between staying open or closing down. Knowing what your customers’ wants and needs are—and being able to pinpoint marketing specifically to them— is invaluable to driving revenue.
At least that’s what the Kevy team at Atlanta’s Tech Village has learned since its initial launch in 2012. Kevy’s original objective was creating a cloud-based application that synced data among a variety of programs commonly used by e-commerce businesses.
“What we learned, though,” says 27-year-old Kevy CEO and co-founder Brooke Beach, “is that the bottom line is our customers are online retailers. What they want is marketing automation—something to help drive revenue.”
That’s when the next generation of Kevy was born in June 2015. Today, Kevy focuses on business to business marketing automation for online retailers. Think of it as email marketing on steroids. Online retailers use Kevy to do everything from sending emails with specific discounts to specific buyers on their client lists, to creating dynamic pop-up offers to website visitors based on those customers’ past buying preferences. There’s even an option to target customers living in a precise area, i.e. a 20-mile radius of the storefront.
While other digital marketing platforms such as MailChimp are popular with online retailers, Beach says Kevy offers something they don’t. “Our wow factor is that we can tie back to the penny how much revenue each campaign brought in for the store, so a retailer knows if one works and one doesn’t,” she says.
So far, Kevy is targeting mid-market businesses such as Stupid Cancer, Blinc Makeup and Go2 Outfitters, and customers pay a monthly fee based on their number of contacts. But Beach says they have plans to bring in big enterprise customers such as local Atlanta companies Spanx and Carter’s. “We can handle them,” she says. “It’s more about getting in front of them.” And considering online retail sales were estimated at only about 7 percent of all sales this year, Beach says, Kevy is very well positioned to increase its customer base in the future.
Kevy’s future is also well positioned thanks to its team of successful leaders such as CEO Beach and co-founder David Cummings, who also steered the prosperous sale of his startup, Pardot. So far, Kevy has raised $400,000 in a seed round. Being in Buckhead and Atlanta Tech Village also doesn’t hurt. “It’s fantastic here. We are all in the startup scene together,” Beach says. “It’s a close-knit community. In some sense, we all act as one.”
Visit kevy.com
STORY: Sarah Gleim
PHOTOS: Sara Hanna
