AllTopStartups
December 30, 2016
How Insider Founders Built a Digital Experience Platform for Marketers
Accessible from a unified data engine, Insider enables marketers to leverage personalization, predictive segmentation and real-time technologies to boost loyalty and digital growth.
Founded in 2012, Insider is a technology company with offices in London, Moscow, Singapore, Dubai, Warsaw, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. Insider was listed as one of Europe’s 100 Hottest Startups in 2016 by WIRED Magazine, featuring European startups that are having an impact.
Helping world’s leading brands grow beyond the speed of customer expectations, Insider is trusted by over 200 businesses across various industries including Toyota, UNIQLO, Media Markt, Lenovo, Singapore Airlines, MasterCard, BBVA, Fiat, Carrefour, Ticketmaster, Air Arabia, Tune Hotels, Dominos, McDonalds, Avon and CNN.
Prior to Insider, Hande and Serhat met at the the London School of Economics and following their graduation started their careers in China and Russia, respectively. One day, the idea of building an international school at the heart of a British town in Turkey inspired them quit their jobs overnight and start their entrepreneurship journey.
They were inspired by the large population of British families living in Fethiye, a British town located at the southwest part of Turkey. They have disrupted the industry by establishing a highly reputable education center which was named English & More International Learning Centre (now IM Academy), where students received world-class education and could choose to home stay with English families.
In three years, they have recruited over 3000 students from over 30 countries. The school was acquired in 2011 ending their first entrepreneurship journey with a lucrative exit, planting the seeds for Insider.
1X entrepreneurs Serhat Soyuerel and Hande Cilingir, following a lucrative exit, established Insider with three other co-founders with this goal in mind. The 32-year old female co-founder was announced as the CEO of the company and recently was granted “The women entrepreneur of the year” award by Microsoft. All co-founders were selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs in IPS, 2014.
One of our co-founders (also Serhat & Hande’s colleague from LSE) was working at an international company where he was responsible for the entire digital marketing budget and was under great pressure from the top management to decrease his spend. Even though there were lots of tech providers pitching him marketing tech and analytics solutions, promising to increase conversion rates and revenue, there weren’t any capable of cost optimization.
There were too many web/mobile personalization, segmentation and A/B/n testing tools out there mostly for e-commerce firms, claiming that they increase conversions and revenue. Insider co-founders wanted to develop a technology that would go beyond that and help digital marketers across sectors optimize marketing spend and effort.
For instance, predicting income levels of visitors on a financial institution’s site and knowing which visitors are more likely to apply for a credit card, marketers can deliver relevant offers, accordingly. Insider founders found a technology GAP in the digital customer experience delivery space and filled it with our predictive modelling technology.
From e-commerce to finance, media to health, digital marketers across sectors are relying on big data and predictive analytics to gain actionable insights and make better marketing decisions. Leveraging technology to predict the future behaviour of customers is bringing marketers even closer to the preferences of their customers, allowing them to personalize digital experiences on web, mobile web and apps.
The gap between the marketer and the customer is decreasing. In the past marketers were not able to accurately segment customers. Today’s emerging marketing technologies are allowing marketers to segment their customers and deliver hyper-targeted, personalized campaigns.
Predictive modelling and auto-optimization technologies will be disrupting the digital customer experience delivery space. Being able to predict the future behaviour of online and mobile visitors, the gap between marketers and customers will decrease further.
Their product addresses major pains of digital marketers across sectors, mainly retail, media, travel, finance and e-gaming;
1. It helps them optimize marketing spend besides increasing conversions and revenue.
2. It helps marketers deliver hyper-targeted campaigns on web, mobile web and apps by leveraging advanced predictive segmentation capabilities.
3. It provides all the tools digital marketers need to deliver personalized experiences from a unified platform.
Visitor behaviour on web, mobile web and apps are tracked and a machine-learning algorithm places visitors into ready-to-use segments, in real-time. Marketers can use these segments to deliver personalized experiences, campaigns and ads.
For instance, a visitor’s likelihood to make a purchase online is predicted based on their online behaviour and knowing which segments are more or less inclined to buy an item on a given e-commerce site, marketers can easily prioritize who they would like to target with discount messages or advertisements.
Insider records over 600 million unique users/month, 11 billion page views/month and 374 million personalization campaign impressions/month.
