By Riley Kaminer
Ever interact with a brand and leave the interaction with a niggling feeling that you were neglected. If so, you’re not alone. According to supply chain expert Dr. John Gattorna, around two thirds of consumers feel the same way and avoid making future purchases with the brand.
Miami startup Paylode can help. The company empowers businesses to launch, manage, and monetize amazing perks programs for their customers. And this week, it announced a $5.5 million seed round from Susa Ventures, Vinyl Capital, Struck Capital, Day One Ventures and others to pioneer the next-gen digital customer engagement tools.
“After working with global airlines and ecommerce brands, I couldn’t believe how difficult it was for companies to launch their own partnerships and perks programs,” founder and CEO Mikhail Naumov said in a statement.
“After speaking with a hundred CXOs and partnership leaders, we saw an urgent need for an off-the-shelf SaaS tool that can do the heavy lifting, while enabling companies to stay focused on their core business,” Naumov continued. “So, we built Paylode – a modern platform to power wonderful perks programs for companies and their customers.”
“Credit cards and airlines have enjoyed these benefits for decades through their in-house points and perks programs, and we built a practical way for any company to quickly launch curated and valuable perks programs of their own.”
Before launching Paylode, Naumov co-founded DigitalGenius, a platform backed by Salesforce Ventures that applied artificial intelligence and machine learning to customer service contexts. DigitalGenius had partnerships with a wide range of major firms including NVIDIA, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Accenture.
Why bother launching a perks program? Paylode asserts that such programs can enable businesses to grow their reach, engage customers more deeply, and retain them for long-term repeat purchases. According to the startup, their platform costs a fraction of the $350,000 to $500,000 brands typically have to pay to launch a perks program in-house.
The platform’s features include a perks marketplace, with a curated selection of thousands of offers from consumer brands; a non-code program builder to easily create and deploy programs; embeddable engagement campaigns to quickly notify a business’s audience of various offers; and much more.
“Every single company right now is figuring out how to retain their customers while driving down costs, especially in this economic environment,” commented Leo Polovets, founding partner at Susa Ventures. “Paylode’s approach to perks programs not only addresses the rising challenges of customer acquisition costs but also provides a seamless solution for businesses to drive deeper engagement and unlock additional revenue streams.”
In its beta, Paylode has already attracted 50+ clients and brought 1,000+ brands into its perks ecosystem. The deals on its platform have helped over a million customers save money and time.
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