• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, Jess Nelson , September 23, 2015

Rare.io, an email marketing startup, launched an automated predictive solution today that it claims is “proven to drive repeat business and increase average email click-through rates by three to five times.”

The company says the solution delivers emails to customers based on the details of individual purchase history, rather than blanketing all customers with the same email, regardless of their interests.

Rob Lane, CEO of Rare.io., says the startup can predict the next five products a consumer will purchase and how many days, on average, the customer will take between purchases. Emails are then tailored to deliver content that the customer will be most interested in engaging with at the most opportune time.

This combination of content and timing dramatically increases click-through rates. “The industry average click-through rate in ecommerce is about 3%, but we’re seeing increases of 15% to even 20%,” he adds.

“Anyone who's ever purchased anything online knows the relentless spam that’s certain to follow,” he stated. “Since we quietly launched in February, we’ve sent over 17 million emails that are directly attributable for $2.3 million in incremental revenue for the stores.”

The company hopes to provide small to mid-size ecommerce stores with a more sophisticated predictive algorithm. It can analyze which products were bought and when, provide a personalized recommendation list, and even send the emails at the time they’re most likely to be opened.

More importantly for marketers and retailers, Lane says Rare.io’s technology can predict when a customer might go away altogether.

By predicting the lifetime value of a customer, and analyzing whether that value is increasing or decreasing, Rare.io aims to limit unsubscribes and customer loss. “Store owners spend a lot of money to recruit customers, but 80% of customers only ever make one purchase from a store,” says Lane. “We want to stop the churn, stop it [losing customers] from happening.”

Online retailers hosted on the Shopify and Spree platforms can implement Rare.io and create custom email designs using drag-and-drop technology. The platforms work with approximately 500 customers. The company has received positive feedback from customers so far, with 48 reviews and a 10/10 rating in the Shopify app store.

Eventually, Lane says Rare.io hopes to implement its technology within a retailer’s Web site itself, so that consumers see specific products tailored to them while browsing.

“Since implementing Rare.io, we’ve gone through a major shift in how we’re using newsletters as a marketing tool in our company,” stated Sebastian Kaufmann, founder and CEO of Kaufmann Mercantile. “We switched from sending emails to one group of people, to a ‘web’ of emails, which are segmented, incredibly personalized and running on automated triggers according to each individual's behavior.”

Eventually, Lane says Rare.io hopes to implement its technology within a retailer’s Web site itself, so that consumers see specific products tailored to them while browsing.

The startup, which currently has five employees, was initially founded in 2009 but spent the first four years building its predictive technology and memory database. After an initial seed round of $469K in July 2014, the company plans for a Series A round later this year.