Email startup wants to reward customers for engaging with marketing campaigns

Heather McIlvaine

1st Aug 2018

Retailers in recent years have gained access to a growing number of tools to improve their email marketing campaigns.

They can automate messages to prevent missed opportunities, personalise content to ensure relevance and tap into artificial intelligence-driven insights to reduce workload.

But they still face a fundamental problem: getting customers to open, or even see, their email in the first place. According to Statista, as much as 50 per cent of emails in March 2018 were classified as spam.

But an Australian startup has an idea to get around the engagement issue by providing customers with an incentive for doing so.

Sendy is building an open API that will allow marketers to integrate rewards into any email platform to incentivise customers to engage with their email marketing campaigns.

Customers who engage will earn digital tokens, which they can redeem with Sendy to access loyalty programs with marketers, exchange for digital currencies, or donate to charitable causes.

“It is becoming progressively harder for legitimate marketers to get in front of their customers and the statistics are showing this. The real problem lies in the failure to value user attention adequately,” Sendy co-founder George Hartley said.

Hartley and the Sendy team are also responsible for building email marketing tools Sendicate and SmartrMail, which collectively serve 7000 active users, sending over 1 billion emails per year to 72 million email subscribers.

When Sendy launches, users on both apps will be able to attach tokens to their email campaigns. The startup recently raised US$500,000 in seed funding from Techemy Capital and Apollo Capital for its solution to improve customer engagement.