Led by TapCommerce founders, startup Attentive launches SMS/MMS marketing platform

A New York City-based startup, led by the co-founders of Twitter-acquired in-app ad retargeter TapCommerce, is out today with a new mobile messaging platform.

The company, Attentive, has had its platform in the field for the last eight months, during which time it has been employed by more than four dozen client companies, including Boxed, AMOREPACIFIC and Bliss. Today, the company is announcing the platform, as well as announcing that it has acquired $13 million in Series A funding.

The platform is targeted at ecommerce and retail brands, and it supports SMS and MMS messages for targeted promotions, retargeting, customer service, transactions (i.e., purchases made via text messaging) or retention.

The messaging, which is permission-based, can include text, links, animated GIFs, videos or a templated survey. Customer replies can be pushed to customer service platforms Kustomer or Zendesk for further interaction.

One-to-one messaging can be targeted by behavior, such as cart abandonment, big spending with a brand or previous mobile purchases that can trigger reminders to reorder or to try a related product.

Co-founder and CEO Brian Long told me that mobile messages delivered through his company’s platform have a click-through rate of more than 30 percent. He added that clients have received a tenfold increase in revenue per message, compared to email.

A key differentiator from other SMS/MMS messaging platforms, Long said, is Attentive’s patent-pending two-tap opt-in text. A promotion on the mobile website of a brand can be deep-linked to the SMS text-messaging app, where a signup is pre-filled.

A user on a retailer’s mobile website, for instance, could click on a promo to receive texts about new sales, and one click will take her to her phone’s SMS messaging app, where the signup is pre-filled. A second click signs her up so she can receive text messages from the brand.