Loopfuse Gets Series A Funding from True Ventures

Written by Bernard Lunn / February 15, 2009 11:50 AM / 3 Comments

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True Ventures got our attention by closing a Series A deal in the dark days just after the financial meltdown, funding Syncplicity. It has just announced that it is funding LoopFuse, a late entrant to the very crowded marketing automation space. Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse, confirms that the Series A investment is $1.4 million. This puts True Ventures into the very elite class of VCs that have sealed two Series A deals in web technology since the financial meltdown (the other VC is Emergence Capital).

Check out the True Ventures blog, which offers some interesting thoughts on whether the downturn will "re-invent venture capital."

Marketing Automation Is a Crowded Space

Marketing automation is nothing new. Vendors like Eloqua and Unica have been around for a while. Salesforce.com is in the game, too. If you Google "marketing automation," you'll see plenty of vendors making Google rich by buying those ad words.

If you're not familiar with the market, here are three good resources for understanding marketing automation:

The first is a summary of five problems that marketing automation means to solve.
The second is an analysis of vendors in the market. It is thorough, if a bit biased in favor of solutions that integrate with Salesforce.com.
Finally, here are some tweets about marketing automation, which, as it happens, is how I discovered LoopFuse. I was investigating the marketing automation space in general and, augmenting my Google search with a Twitter search as I now do, came across this brash upstart calling its competitors names:

"To Marketo and their overpriced Toy for Marketing Tots™, and Eloqua, with their Techological Torture Device™, I say, Get some coffee and try to stay awake. If it was bad for you when it was two guys (and a dog), it's going to be an utter nightmare now."

Are these More Tornado Tactics?

That's tough talk! Kind of funny as well, which is the point of punk marketing. This is exactly what punk musicians did when they landed on a very established music scene. Stiff Records, of the late 1970s London punk scene, was a master of the game.

This is also the sort of tactics one sees in the high growth ("tornado") phase of markets, when a lot of vendors duke it out for market share. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, is a master of this and has spawned many imitators. The tactics are so common now that they are in danger of losing their effectiveness unless they carry real substance or are very, very funny. LoopFuse may not have scored on the first count, but it got at least a chuckle here.

Measuring Your CAC to ACV Ratio

Bruce Cleveland, Partner at Interwest Ventures, which funded another company in the marketing automation space (Marketo), has a great blog entry about how much money it takes to build a SaaS vendor. He focuses specifically on the cost of marketing:

"SaaS companies do need to aggressively monitor and manage their customer acquisition costs (CAC). If Annual Contract Value (ACV is the expected annual stream of cash flows expected from each subscriber) is relatively low against the cost to initially acquire the customer, then the SaaS company can quickly get into cash trouble.

This is why I like my portfolio companies to constantly monitor and manage their customer acquisition to ACV ratio. A good target ratio to strive for is 1 or less -- far less being the goal. That is, when you divide the total customer acquistion costs by the first year ACV, the resultant should be a number equal or less than 1. Customer acquisition costs should include: all direct and indirect marketing costs, commissions, and T&E."

Why Get into Such a Crowded Space?

Because SaaS may be re-invigorating marketing automation. Traditional enterprise software has been a face-to-face sales game. SaaS is a marketing game, with telephone sales thrown in the mix, but with mass-marketing analytics driving the funnel management.

Revenue growth is priority #1 for everyone. So, investing in productivity to drive revenue makes sense. This may explain why True Ventures has funded a late entrant to the crowded market.

When I asked Sean Dwyer, he suggested that user-friendly design was the key. Perhaps. Malcom Friedberg, of LeadDogs, asks on Twitter:

"I'm trying to get data points on how long it takes for a new user to become proficient on a marketing automation platform, any suggestions?"

SaaS vendors win one click at a time. So, this learning curve maybe the key differentiator.

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Search Engine Optimizers

SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimizer" or “Search Engine Optimization”.

SEOs provide useful services for websites and for website owners,

SEO can do:

Writing content for the website
Giving advice on site architecture
Finding relevant directories to which a site can be submitted
(to make it reachable to more and more...)

Finally, SEO should bring relevant visitors to your website

Overall, "to make a website relevant and useful for one or many topics"
This is what I feel.

Please make a not that manipulating search engine results is not the work of SEO this is unfair and very ugly.

No search engine has got any relationship with any SEO company and they are 100% independent of their own. All the search engines have their own method for displaying search results for a given search term.

All search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN wants to display search result very appropriate for the user.

So what they do?
They have index of millions of WebPages, it means they are aware of so many WebPages and they have their method to rank them for a given keyword.

They know which page out of all is most important and relevant for a given keyword. But who will make a decision? “The Formula” it can be like

(aPbBc)/2Qbvy
----------------
110000*gWY

he he . who knows?? :)

In simple what we can understand is there are two important points.
1. Your website and - (Content of your website)
2. Other websites - (Other websites)

Your website:
That can be done in any language or on any platform for a purpose.

So, your purpose to create a website is very much important. Your website must full fill that purpose. If your website is solving the purpose of its existence then of course it is a relevant website for that topic or keyword and it should be reachable to maximum people who are in search on that.

For example: An e-commerce website. Web site is supposed to sell cloth items. How this website will become a relevant website for search term “Buy a Dress Online”

Website should have to sell something called Dress, is not it?
Website should have enough information on Dress.

If the website has enough content for selling dress online, then for sure is relevant for search phrase “Buy Dress Online”

SEOs (search engine optimizer) says this "on page optimization"

What they do here? Once I have enough content that’s all, why they need to do anything?

Yes!! here the SEO will help you in presenting your website to search engines. They will highlight those words, keywords which is important for your website.

How they will do that?

Search engines are not human being. They read text on your website. For example by reading a text in bold you will know, this is something more important then normal text.

SEO knows which text to place and where to place and how.

That is all about on page optimization.

Now we can see, what they know and we don’t.
even we should know…

Keyword in URL
First word is best, second is better, like Indian-SEO it says first Indian then SEO

Keyword in domain name
Same as in www.Indian-SEO.com

Keyword in title tag
Keyword in Title tag - in beginning
Title tag 10 - 60 characters, no special character like “>(){}&*%#@”

Keyword in H1, H2 and H3
Use H1 font style – very important

Keyword in description meta tag
Talk about your theme, less than 200 chars is ok.

Keyword in keyword metatag
Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body.
If not, it is irrelevance and not good

Keyword density in body text
5 - 20% - (all keywords/ total words)

Individual keyword density
1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words)

Keyword font size
In strong, bold, italic, etc.

Keyword proximity for 2 or more keywords
More adjacent is better

Keyword phrase order
Order in the page should match order in the search query?
Better you anticipate query – better your chances are.

Keyword prominence
Most important at top of page, in bold, in large font

Keyword in alt text
Should describe graphic - Do not fill with spam

Domain Name Class
.edu - seem to be given the highest status
.org - sites seem to be given high status
.com – normal

File Size
Do not exceed 100K page size.
Search engines preferred
URL length
You should keep it minimized - use less than the 2,000 characters allowed by IE - less than 100 is good

Site Size – Search engines likes big sites
Larger sites are presumed to be better funded, better organized, better constructed, and therefore better sites.

Site Age
Old is gold.

Now we can talk about the other part Other Websites
How old they are?
How many pages they have?
What all they are doing?
How many friend they have got?

Yes, we should know all these things. we will talk about this next time.
I will write that part soon...

Send you comments on abhishek@indian-seo.com or visit http://www.indian-seo.com/
Bangalore India based web development and SEO Service provider and Hosting company Indian SEO

Posted by: bobrose | April 27, 2009 10:26 PM

thanks for article very

Posted by: nusret | August 2, 2009 7:31 AM

Yes it is marketing automation is not a new thing and many vendors are in the market from long term.And we can see that google adword is a big help for marketers.

Posted by: Vet | January 13, 2010 12:49 AM