ZineOne collects cash for e-commerce companies to predict customer behavior

In-session marketing, a type of inbound marketing that attempts to analyze and influence the purchasing decisions of web and app users, is often challenging to implement. In today’s fierce competition for consumers’ attention, it’s rare for a brand to make a lasting first impression. According to Microsoft Research, people only spend about 10 seconds on a company’s home page if the page isn’t immediately connected to a marketing message.

Debjani Deb, Manish Malhotra and Arnab Mukherjee, co-founders of in-session marketing platform ZineOne, discuss the hurdles surrounding direct customer engagement in their previous ventures. Deb previously founded Empower, a company that provides tools for social media research and media monitoring, and Malhotra founded his own company, Social Layer, to build social media capabilities for large enterprises. As for Mukherjee, he left Oracle to launch Udichi, a computing platform for “big data” analytics.

In the early days of Zine On, Deb, Malhotra and Mukherjee met at the Milpitas Library in Santa Clara and local coffee shops to envision where online marketing technology was headed. They concluded that capturing real-time customer decisions was the key to increasing conversions, springboarding ZineOne’s first series of products.

After attracting clients such as Men’s Wearhouse, Wynn Resorts, Advance Auto Parts and Kohl’s, ZineOne has raised $27.4 million in Series C funding, the company announced today. Signal Fire led the round, with participation from Norwest and others, bringing Zino’s total proceeds to $42 million.

Deb told TechCrunch in an email interview, “We believe that session marketing is a critical and perhaps the most important part of modern marketing for brands in a privacy-first world.” enabling them to capture, resulting in more efficient pre-acquisition dollars and less reliance on remarketing strategies.”

At its core, ZineOne — which specifically serves e-commerce brands — uses AI to score behavior and personalize website and app users’ personal experiences. By observing a visitor’s first few clicks or taps, the platform can tailor the messages, discounts and product recommendations they see in real time.

It’s worth noting that a large segment of consumers disagree, at least according to some surveys. Any A type of behavioral tracker for marketing. The rejected segment may stem from biases in AI systems that may influence the experiences of certain segments of customers. But Deb Zinone argues that there are safeguards in place to allay these fears.

For example, ZineOne uses anonymized session data to run analytics, Deb says — essentially a “large set of behavioral events” for each visitor, including product list views, cart updates and checkouts. The platform’s targeting is based on short-term behaviors, so it doesn’t need to store any longitudinal identity or profile data, she says.

“ZineOne’s in-session marketing platform focuses on these three key pillars: to understand in-session behaviors of anonymous visitors (not just known customers), predict outcomes and capture in-session best practices,” said Deb. “ZineOne’s Early Purchase Prediction Model Speaks [brands] Within 5 clicks anonymous visitors are more likely to buy, who is on the fence and who is not likely to buy in that session. You can trigger experiences today, now, in the moment based on consumer buying habits.

ZineOne isn’t the only platform applying data analytics to personalize e-commerce. Acquired by McDonald’s in 2019 before being sold to Mastercard, DynamicYield uses AI to customize content on websites, insert product recommendations and dynamically change the layout of web streams. There’s also the metric, site visitors, cart bounce or abandonment, and making them “top targets” to convince these prospects to continue shopping.

But Deb Zino argues that it’s unique in its breadth of AI systems, which can predict friction and price volatility in the trading process within a single session. The current product roadmap is focused on producing new predictive models and building new data visualizations, she said.

ZineOne plans to expand its headcount, increasing it by 70% by the end of the year.

“ZineOne provides end users with a better personalized browsing and shopping experience without compromising privacy through cookie tracking and shadow profiles… The time is right for session shopping for many reasons: consumer data privacy regulations are increasing and customer acquisition costs are increasing for retailers,” said Deb. The retail sector has seen significant e-commerce growth during the pandemic and now faces various challenges as the economy slows and inflation rises. ZineOne reveals a blind spot for these major brands, which serves the needs of the anonymous consumer and what is happening immediately while the consumer is actively engaging with the brand. It acknowledges that it exists.