With US$2m funding, this local startup makes e-mail marketing smarter

It provides solutions that integrate with email service provider.

Digital advertising spending is growing rapidly in Southeast Asia, but Stanford University graduate, Paul Tenney, argued that marketers in the region are still struggling with basic campaign management. The majority of marketing technology solutions, which are mainly based in the US and Europe, do not address the specific and niche challenges found in Southeast Asia markets, he said. “For example, segmentation among the countries and languages can turn a single campaign in the US or Europe, into six or 12 campaigns in Southeast Asia – an executional nightmare,” he explained.

During Paul’s stint here in Singapore with a US email marketing provider, he saw that current solutions for marketers and ecommerce companies in Southeast Asia could not meet their needs. He decided to start Ematic Solutions in 2012 which was aimed at helping marketers easily build and deploy high-ROI email marketing programmes, using an artificial intelligence engine that works smoothly with a company’s existing systems which essentially simplifies email marketing for businesses in Southeast Asia.It is a SaaS provider headquartered in Singapore, offering cloud-based solutions that help digital marketers efficiently build and deploy sophisticated, high-return on investment (ROI) email marketing programs. These platforms seamlessly integrate with a company’s Email Service Provider (ESP) (eg: MailChimp) and leverage a powerful suite of plug-and-play apps that massively increase conversions by driving database growth and improving customer engagement.

After graduating from Stanford University in 2002, Paul joined one of the premier enterprise email marketing firms in Silicon Valley and started a journey that took him around the globe helping Fortune 500 companies like eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Expedia build world-class, high-ROI email marketing programmes.

He landed in Southeast Asia in 2010 and has made Singapore his home together with his family. He is now a Singapore citizen.

What sets Ematic Solutions apart?

Ematic Solutions is focused on channel management. According to Paul, they analyse database health, quality and growth. This, he said, differs from numerous providers such as MailChimp, which focus on campaign management and emphasize content instead.

“By providing plug-and-play intelligence solutions, customers of Ematic Solutions can still use their existing best-of-breed campaign management tools to dramatically improve the performance of every campaign,” he noted.

Paul explained that the key to Ematic Solutions’ approach is quick and easy integration with zero disruption. “We understand that products need to be plug-and-play, easy to use and, ideally for intelligence solutions, be non-disruptive to existing marketing processes. This would allow marketers to increase their ROI in their digital marketing campaigns,” he said.

Funding
Ematic Solutions’ total funding to date is US$2 million. The company recently raised close to US$1 million in pre-Series A funding from MDI Ventures, a corporate venture capital fund backed by Telkom Indonesia, in February 2016. This followed an earlier seed funding round of US$1.07 million, closed in December 2015. Initially, funding was from friends and family.

As they aim to be the dominant player in the region through expansion, they are working on raising Series A fundling later this year. It just opened its Jakarta office in February 2016.