Plumb5, over a conversation. This is a chat transcript of a discussion between Jon, an angel investor and

VJ, CEO & Co-Founder at Plumb5. The conversation covers most nuances

of the product and we, at Plumb5 feel that the document should be shared

with users, interested in knowing the features and advantages of the

product

The intro conversation has been deleted as it is not in context to the product. Recorded on Oct 24th 2013

Jon Tell me about your product

VJ Our product is called Plumb5. It is a marketing eco-system. It is an integrated marketing platform which unifies customer interactions across all touch-points and provides the marketer with a unified view

Jon So how does it help?

VJ This unified data allows marketers to analyze their customer across touch-points, and helps them in targeting their visitors/customers better

Jon How do you do that?

VJ

We record behavior of visitors coming to the website. Based on machine script, we stack data of the behavior. Based on behavior, we enable identification workflow for gathering email id. With this email, we tag their mail, social and other data related to this email

Jon That sounds interesting! Does it have an inbuilt web tracker?

VJ Yes, the platform has a built in tracker for tracking all web assets and is integrated with an email engine to tag back all responses back to behavior

Jon So you also provide an inbuilt email management?

VJ Yes, And it is seamlessly integrated to the platform

Jon Why not, just integrate with market leaders like Marketo, Mailchimp ..

VJ We did try. The hurdles are that you can load your contacts to any of these mail tools but you cannot tag back the user coming from these sources, as there is no specific identifier to tag the respondent

Jon Got it. So the loop ends with a single campaign.

VJ

Yes, and we feel it is very essential, as a marketer, to check what the user does when he responds to the mail campaign. Based on these responses, you can personalize your next campaign and so forth. In fact, mail plays an important touch-point for all communications

Jon But, most marketers in US would prefer best-of-breed tools

VJ

Sure. Best-of-breed tools allow you to analyze your data better and get max results. It’s all about efficiency and performance. If you agree with these definitions for best-of-breed, we surely can make it to that list. it’s about knowing your respondents, both prospects and customers, and their past mail behavior to be able to design successful campaigns

Jon I agree. Do you have a deck so explains more about this?

VJ Sure. You might find this link useful http://blackbox4.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/zoom-into-your-mail-marketing-campaigns/

Jon Thanks. Will look it up. Tell me, How do you link up social data?

VJ

We connect social platforms using their web services and stack relevant data. As a fallback, we also use third party services to get aggregated social data from lesser known sites. Along with profile lookup, we also aggregate sentiments and alert marketers on any brand related remarks

Jon Do you tag social sentiments?

VJ Yes. The marketer can set keywords and monitor them for related posts. This allows in quickly addressing social questions or complaints. Also identifies if the posting member is a prospect or a customer

Jon That’s useful. Who would be your audience?

VJ Anybody with a marketing website is our audience. ECommerce websites find maximum value with our product. He have successfully tested it across Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion and 5 other known platforms.

Jon How does it work with web stores?

VJ The tracker works, just as normal like for other websites. We use API services to sync product and transaction data, so that the commerce marketers can view the behavior and transaction data on a single platform

Jon What happens to web stores with no web services?

VJ We allow the marketer to upload the product list with product id and price. And for customer tagging, we provide added scripts for customer identification

Jon Great. How many ecommerce customers are you working with

VJ We are working with 23 commerce customers, mostly in India

Jon How many customers totally?

VJ We have 106 customers. Mostly Small and Medium Businesses

Jon What feature appeals the most, with your current customers

VJ

Our customers find the personalization and targeting feature to be very useful. We have automated lead generation and conversion workflows, which has increased their conversion rate by more than 120%. In fact, we have 35 customers, who have renewed for the third consecutive year

Jon Increasing conversion rate! Tell me more

VJ

We helped setup workflows for identifying unknown visitors and to nurture prospects to customers. The workflow works on simple scoring method and targets content, based on conversion stage. With this, visitor engagement on website increased resulting in successful goal paths

Jon That’s interesting! How do you target content?

VJ The platform allows the marketer to upload content or integrate with their existing CMS. We can then set rules based on various parameters to display the content

Jon What kind of parameters are you working on

VJ

There are numerous parameters we work on. Starting from behavioral parameters like Views, Frequency Page Depth, Time Spend to interaction parameters to social parameters to transactional parameters. It finally depends on the data-sets tagged to the unified profile

Jon You said that the workflow works on scoring models. Can you explain?

VJ

The platform allows the marketer to assign scores for every parameter so that it becomes easy to segment visitors in real-time based on scores. Here is a link that documents the various scoring options available on the platform http://blackbox4.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/visitor-scoring-and-segmentation/

Jon Great!. Let me go through this. Okay. I would like to know how easy your integrations are.

VJ It’s an easy 3-4 step configuration process for any ecommerce store integration. For CRM systems like Sales Force and Sugar CRM, it takes about 2 steps. We are working on simplifying POS integration too

Jon Have you integrated with any large data

VJ We are testing our platform on Amazon Big Data servers for a large banking business. We are relying on Amazon’s environment for load optimization to handle large traffic

Jon Sure, Data performance is the concern with most large companies. Is the product prepared for huge data transactions

VJ

Our UCP string methodology, which we have patented, allows us to perform queries without having to hit the server as many times. We store all the information related to the customer on a single string and serve just the string, for all insights about that customer, to the requesting touch-point. This helps us in triggering real-time engagements

Jon You mean engagements on the website?

VJ Engagements on any touch-points. The string is made available at the website, or at the CRM desk or even the POS app

Jon Why is it needed at the other apps?

VJ

Since the customer interactions at the store, is recorded on the POS app, the string is required to deliver customer related insights or recommendations, based on past activities. Just as same, a support executive can handle their customers better, with access to rich insights available, in the string.

Jon Sure. I can also see integrated retention campaigns across touch-points.

VJ Yes, The integration allows the marketer to run retention campaigns across touch-points based on segmentation. You will see that these responses are stored back into the UCP for insights and made available at the next touch-point instantly

Jon Awesome! That’s a full circle. This adds a lot of business value and will open avenues for new insights and predictions

VJ

Certainly! Since we record every interaction of a customer journey, we are able to collect spends and revenue made at each touch-point. With a few inputs like contributing margin, interest rates, one can now calculate the present value and LTV of a customer.

Jon Interesting!

VJ In fact, the CS app within the Plumb5 platform, aligns spend & revenue data in time series and gives the marketer, a complete report on acquisition and retention spend. Marketers can set alerts for drifting customer and avoid customer churns too.

Jon The product now scopes out of marketing to business analytics. Is this an add-on?

VJ

Actually we believe that, in any business, the biggest variable is a customer. After you have arrived at your contributing margin, it is the lower customer spends and higher product sale that defines your profit. As we unify customer data across touch-points, we have aligned every spend and revenue, thereby deducing performance metrics in real-time, so that the marketers are well aware of the returns on each of their activity

Jon Great! I can see that you are saying that the product can monitor business health in real-time

VJ Sure. You can say that. With increased acquisition & retention rate along with lower retention costs, Plumb5 can insulate businesses from ill-health. ☺

Jon Now that’s a big promise! But don’t you think only enterprises could be a good bet for your product

VJ

Yes. For the full suite, we are looking at the enterprise audience. Since it is modular and one can subscribe to single apps, even a smaller organization can go for it. As most functions, like conversion campaigns, can be automated, any business can find value, regardless of size

Jon How do you differentiate between these large spectrums?

VJ

For delivery model is based on the volume of customers. If the volume of customers is more, we offer an on-premise license, with data maintained at the client's end. For businesses with lesser customers, we offer an On-Demand (SaaS) based solution We are also available as apps on online ecommerce marketplace, which is an extension of our On Demand offerings

Jon Is there a price advantage

VJ Yes. Our competitors are priced 3x higher, without features such as Real-time Engagement, Churn Alerts, Retention Workflows

Jon Great! How easy is it for the marketer?

VJ

The system is configurable and it takes few steps to set it up. The biggest advantage is that the entire marketing team works on a common platform, with access to in-depth prospect or customer information. This avoids redundancy and distributes insights across all apps. For instance, A web chat agent has access to web behavior of the customer, and campaign managers have access to chat conversations, all in real-time. Sales Managers can manage their prospects and Customer managers can run their loyalty programs, all on the same platform

Jon With so many features, doesn’t this platform need a highly qualified professional to manage?

VJ

Yes, you will need a marketing professional to manage but not a large team. Since most features are configurable and work-flow based, you will need a marketing mind to set rules, monitor the activity and optimize conversion flows This allows even the thinnest marketing teams to execute customer campaigns

The remaining part of the conversation was mostly about business growth and had no context to the workings of the platform

If you would like to evaluate, drop a request for a demo by clicking the following link

http://www.plumb5.com/demos.html

To get more information about the product, visit

http://www.plumb5.com