New Latvian VC FlyCap leads Mailigen’s $500 000 Seed Fund for advanced Email Marketing

Double announcement from the Baltics: The new player in the Latvian VC sector, FlyCap, kicked off its portfolio with a half a million seed investment in fellow landsman start up Mailigen. The round was led by FlyCap with participation from investors from Europe, Asia and the US. According to FlyCap’s website (only in Latvian) the firm is investing from a €10.5 fund.

The round will oil up Mailigen’s development machinery, which aims to produce more innovative marketing features and to create a one stop marketing platform for companies to automate their campaign strategies. In-depth data analysis, event management, responsive email templates, mobile version of the platform and video integration are just some of improvements Mailigen is after in the course of 2014.

Email marketing is becoming more attractive largely due to its easily traceable ROI or “track to basket” and proven efficiency, which is second only to SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

Tim Watson, a DMA member and founder of Zettasphere, a specialist email marketing consultancy company, says that email marketing’s momentum will keep on increasing in the near future:

“The role of email marketing in the overall marketing strategy grows significantly. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) National Client report from February 2014 showed the estimated average return from email marketing has increased since 2012 (£21.48 to £24.93 per £1 spent). The ROI is perceived to be higher across B2C marketing (£30.52)”

Mailigen, however, is not the only one around, and the local markets are crowded with competition; a great deal of focus needs to be put into technology development in order to stand out.

“The case of Responsys, which established their Nordic office in Denmark, and of Core Relations, which is selling in the Nordic markets, and services like ExactTarget, which was just bought by Salesforce for 2.5 billion USD, are just a couple of examples emphasizing the rapid development of email marketing in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, as shown in a recent study presented on the Email Vendor Selection website. In order to take advantage of the greater potential of the email marketing industry in Northern Europe, we recently took over LeaderSend.com, a transactional email service, so as to cover full email automation services. Now we are going further and with the additional resources will challenge the global market,” says Janis Rose, CEO of Mailigen.

Mailigen (team seen in image), which describes itself as “Northern Europe’s leading integrated marketing service provider”, has built an extensive set of marketing platforms for email, SMS and social media marketing campaign purposes, promising to significantly improve their client company’s ROI using a service that will require little to no effort to put into action.

Sounds like a good deal, but what does one need to do to get that deliciously increased ROI?

Well the point is exactly that won’t need to do much, as the service tries to be as automated as possible. A quick dip into the company’s service offering reveals that the basic platforms available are marketing automation, which includes everything from creating the content, to timing and targeting it to customers; integrated marketing solutions, which would be the API’s to integrate Mailigen into any external services and receive data on performance in return; social media integration (links, automatic notifications on SoMe feeds etc..); SMS marketing; online survey strategies and the list goes on. Sceptics can go an try out the 30-day free trial.

Additionally, should you not find the ideal solution from the existing platforms, you can always hire some of the Mailigen’s experts to tailor make you the marketing solution you desire.

In terms of pricing its hard to pin down a specific sum, since it all depends on the extent the client intends to use the platforms. Assuming you have anything between 2500 to 5000 subscribers, the subscription fee would be $40/month, and should you seek a custom made template for your newsletter, that would start at $480. For full list of prices, follow up this link.

Mailigen’s customers spread out across 100 countries all over the world. Beside the U.S., which is the main target market, Mailigen has established a presence in China and Russia as well.