Kahuna Challenges the Marketing Automation Status Quo

New innovations in Kahuna’s platform enable marketers to engage customers more authentically and more effectively across multiple channels

Behavioral email capabilities expand Kahuna’s market footprint beyond mobile marketing automation (MMA) and into adjacent markets

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Kahuna, the leader in communication automation for the mobile era, today unveiled a significant evolution of its technology platform to meet current and future demands of marketers. The product brings Kahuna’s renowned capabilities in personalized messaging for mobile -- powered by big data and machine learning -- to other channels, beginning with email. Fueled by a new $45 million round in funding, Kahuna is poised to raise the bar for marketing automation by enabling marketers to engage their customers more authentically across multiple channels, at scale.

Big solution for a big challenge

“It’s a big challenge -- communicating effectively with people at scale -- and Kahuna has been key to addressing it,” said Michael Rodriguez, Director of Product at The Weather Channel. “Companies must engage their customers across different channels and different devices, in a completely authentic and personalized way. To do that, they need a technology partner that can make sense of huge amounts of data, and has the intelligence to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and, yes, on the right device.”

The new innovations in the Kahuna platform are driving personal communication at scale with the following three advancements:

First, there are the big--data and machine learning that Kahuna brought to mobile marketing, and is now bringing to email and other channels. Kahuna’s new email functionalities enable the company to compete with email marketing incumbents ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce; NYSE: CRM), and Responsys (acquired by Oracle; NYSE: ORCL).

As Forrester Research observed in the January 27, 2015, Context Enriches Email Marketing report, "Innovative vendor offerings that emphasize personalization over message deployment make it doable for marketers to design email into multistage, one--to--one customer experiences.” Email is still the so--called workhorse in customer communications, and Kahuna is helping its clients to evolve the email experience by leveraging rich context and behavioral data.

Second, Kahuna’s infrastructure is built to support future use cases as it provides the technology architecture and capacity to work with increasingly massive data sets. The platform will enable Kahuna and its partners to integrate a wide range of channels, as well as the next generation of connected devices driven by the Internet of things (IoT).

Finally, the new platform will enable businesses to respond to an inevitable industry shift: from marketing at people, to communicating with people, at scale.

“It’s time for businesses to stop ‘marketing’, and start communicating,” said Kahuna CEO and co--founder, Adam Marchick. “Businesses have the opportunity to purposefully engage the people they serve at every step of their personal journey. But to do this requires both a new way of thinking -- one where the person you are engaging is at the center of your efforts -- and the technology to achieve it at scale. That’s what we have built with the Kahuna platform.”

Kahuna Capabilities

The platform brings together a suite of capabilities for engaging customers in a holistic way. Kahuna has architected its platform to help companies better serve their customers:

• Understand each user’s omnichannel behavior with a real--time, person--centric data layer. The platform is able to collect and rationalize data at the individual level for billions of users. The data is constantly refreshed so marketers don’t have to make guesses based on aging personas or segments -- they can know the individual behind their many screens. From the mobile app to the in--store POS, Kahuna’s unique mix of SDKs and APIs can ingest, process, and utilize massive amounts of data from any customer touchpoint to ensure that each message sent -- regardless of the delivery channel -- is accurately personalized and delivered at the optimal time.
• Engage where their users are in a simple, personalized way. Now marketers have access to push, in--app, email and Facebook campaigns in the same platform. For each delivery channel, marketers are able to create granularly targeted campaigns directly in the UI or can upload custom segments created in their own backend systems through Kahuna’s new Adaptive campaign functionality. Dynamic attributes, such as location or last category viewed, as well as Kahuna’s unique dynamic deep linking capability, make sending millions of individually personalized messages possible -- without days of leg work.
• Optimize with innovative features that make marketing easier. Kahuna levels up the concept of optimization. Its patent pending, machine--learning informed optimization capabilities ensure that each campaign sees the best results and drives revenue through the use of:
• SendOptimally -- or send time optimization -- uses historical data across all channels to message a user when they’re most likely to engage.
• RevIQ -- or conversion optimization -- determines the optimal time to follow up with a user after an action has not been completed.
• A to E testing -- or message copy optimization -- tests up to five copy variants (in addition to a control group). Both conversion and messaging copy optimization will evaluate results in real time and automatically scale up better performing variants and scale down those that are performing worse.

• Campaign analytics -- or experience optimization -- gives marketers insight into what campaign types and copy are succeeding in producing the desired result versus those that are producing above average opt outs and uninstalls.

The roadmap for communication automation

“Kahuna enables businesses to evolve the way they engage their customers by making their marketing efforts truly about communicating,” said Marchick. “The platform already has superior ‘listening’ capabilities that enable marketers to read digital body language -- what people actually think and feel. On the platform roadmap, we’re planning to provide greater capabilities for customers to respond to personalized messaging. In the end, communication is a bi--directional experience, and the Kahuna platform will continue to pave the way for that experience.”

About Kahuna

Kahuna is a pioneer in communication automation, dedicated to empowering businesses to grow and thrive in the mobile era. We enable a new level of authentic engagement between brands and their customers wherever they are -- the web, email, mobile, social channels -- through personalized communication at scale. Powered by big data and machine learning, we help create delightful experiences for every customer with the perfect message, delivered on the right channel, at just the right time.

Kahuna is trusted by Yelp, The Hearst Corporation, Overstock.com, The Weather Channel, and hundreds of other leading brands. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in New York, Kahuna was founded in 2012 and is funded by Sequoia Capital, SoftTech VC, Tenaya Capital, and others.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150819005227/en/

PAN Communications
Marki Conway, 617-502-4300
[email protected]

Source: Kahuna

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