• by Ray Schultz , February 16, 2018

eRelevance Corp., a customer marketing service for small- to medium-size businesses, posted annual recurring revenue of $7.5 million last year -- up from $3.6 million in 2016.  

Focused on the elective healthcare sector, the company may move into other verticals, and expects to seek additional capital this year, according to co-founder and CEO Bob Fabbio. Its most recent funding round was last March, when it raised $5.1 million.

eRelevance offers a turnkey service to help elective health practices generate more revenue from their customer bases. 

“We offload the work of that they traditionally do, which is email blasting,” Fabbio says.

The firm takes “a more sophisticated approach, where we’re leveraging all kinds of data analytics to personalize communication,” Fabbio adds. This takes place over multiple channels, through which “we surround the customers.”  

Rather than being focused only on triggered email, the company offers “triggered omnichannel,” he continues. “An individual who expresses interest may get touched with personalized email and text, and a couple of social channels and web landing pages, and the list goes on.” 

However, some healthcare prospects have to be brought up to speed on omnichannel marketing. “They see the world through lenses of email blasting, and don’t realize it’s spamming and driving customers away, and we have to educate them as part of sales process,” Fabbio says.

He notes that “each of the practices has between 3,000 an 20,000 patients in the database, and at last count we had run over 12,000 campaigns, touching over 6 million consumers or patients.”

Far from being once-in-a-lifetime event, much elective treatment is ongoing.

 “There’s a lot of repetitive consumption in aesthetic healthcare — people who come in every six weeks for botox,” Fabbio says. “All we're doing is stimulating that customer behavior.” 

The company is now exploring other sectors such as U.S. veterinarians, automotive service centers and independent pharmacies — businesses that have “trusted relationships with their customer base and where there is repetitive discretionary spending,” Fabbio says. 

Such an initiative would probably take place in the second half of the year, and would probably require a doubling of its 68-person staff, and a new funding infusion.“We will be out raising money at some point this year,” Fabbio says.

Last year, eRelevance grew its headcount by 48%. Among its other achievements were the launch of a national marketing education tour for the healthcare sector and release of a research report.