There’s an important agreement between brands and customers who opt into email communication, says Roger Barnette, CEO at MessageGears.
“Customers are saying I need [brands] to deliver content in channels that I’m interested in that have value to me. I gave you my email addresses as a value exchange. If [your] offers aren’t personalized, then I’m likely to unsubscribe,” he told Hypepotamus.
Large enterprises often struggle to create personalized content via email, app, and text messaging campaigns. But that is exactly where MessageGears comes in.
The fast-growing, Atlanta-based marketing platform startup is designed for advanced customer segmentation options. That is particularly important for larger enterprises looking to create more curated, personalized digital marketing campaigns for existing and potential customers alike.
The hybrid SaaS startup has been on an impressive growth kick recently. Over the last year, MessageGears grew both its revenue and headcount by 50% while bringing on big name customers like Indeed, Sherwin Williams, and Sharper Image.
MessageGears has been able to attract new customers because it is helping enterprises keep up with more robust data storage requirements, added Barnette.
“Increasingly, [brands] are storing customer data in private cloud and modern platforms like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and AWS. MessageGears is the only software provider that lets those enterprises leverage that data investment directly, without needing to transform and move that data.”
The team is now over 100 people strong with the majority of those within the Metro Atlanta area.
It also recently closed a $62 million venture round from Atlanta Ventures alongside New York-based investors Long Ridge Equity Partners.
The new funding round is to prepare the team for hiring and international expansion.
“We are selling our software to some of the biggest most respected brands in the world and competing against some of the biggest SaaS software companies in the world. We have a unique solution. We just need fuel in the tank to reach our potential,” added Barnette. “We need to be talking to more customers. We need to expand our sales team and to grow internationally. And we need to continue to expand our product engineering capabilities.”
He added that MessageGears will have employees and a presence outside the US during the course of 2023.
MessageGears is growing in a city well-known for producing email marketing, AdTech, and marketing automation startups. Beyond the household name of Mailchimp, Atlanta has produced Pardot (acquired by Exact Target and ultimately acquired by Salesforce), Terminus, Salesfusion (acquired by SugarCRM), UserIQ, Springbot, ClickDimensions, and Springbot.
