July 30, 2015
Modern marketing tech takes off, Autopilot launches flight school platform to give marketers tools for success
Autopilot, the multi-channel marketing automation platform, today announced a $7M strategic investment to bring personalized marketing to the masses, increasing total funding to $20.5M. Autopilot aims to fill the void between basic email software and complex marketing software designed for the tech elite, and will use the new financing to transform every business with powerful customer journeys.
Salesforce Ventures and Stage One Capital join previous investors Blackbird Ventures, Garnett Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners, and Tim Draper.
“This new investment shows the immense interest and growth in marketing technology,” said Co-founder and CEO Mike Sharkey. “In the past, very few companies could even dream of using marketing automation because the barrier to entry has been too steep — the price too high and the technology too complex. Autopilot is making it possible for businesses of any size to create personalized customer experiences at scale, and at an affordable entry point.”
Democratizing Tools for Marketers
Currently, only 4 percent of all companies use marketing automation and 44 percent have never even heard of it. To address this clear gap in awareness and education, today Autopilot is also announcing Flight School, a marketing education platform aimed at empowering marketers through a series of guides and training courses. Autopilot is democratizing marketing automation for the masses, raising awareness and diminishing the barrier to entry.
On one end of the spectrum, basic emailing software provides batch and blast capabilities suitable for small companies with simple needs. On the other end, higher end marketing automation is typically more complex and carries a higher price tag and operating costs. Autopilot is bridging the gap between these two service groups by providing companies with a powerful, scalable platform that is both affordable for SMBs and flexible for Fortune 500 companies.
Flight School will deliver years worth of best practices and insight on how marketers can best connect with their customers throughout the customer journey. Specifically:
- Instant access to pre-built, customer journey templates, called Guides
- Best practices and methodologies for growing leads and sales online, the easy way
- Ability to comment on and share valuable HTML, video and e-book content
Marketing Automation Is Taking Off
Spending on marketing software will grow from $20.2 billion in 2014 to more than $32.3 billion in 2018, according to IDC. Despite launching just four months ago, Autopilot has experienced high interest and demand for the platform spiking with signups. Autopilot has signed up over 3,000 companies to help connect their marketing systems and create remarkable customer journeys. Recently named a “high performer” in the VentureBeat Marketing Automation quadrant, Autopilot’s client roster includes Cambium Networks, Dolby, Freshdesk, Narrative, and PandaDoc. Platform integration partners include GoodData, Salesforce, Segment, Slack, Twilio and Zapier. The company has also been named as an “OnCloud Top 50 Company to Watch” and was added to the G2Crowd Marketing Automation Grid as a top-performer.
“We chose Autopilot to power our marketing because we needed a solution that gave us the ability to market at the speed of business, and could also scale along with our company,” said Michelle Pampin, Vice President of Global Marketing and Global Channel Management at Chicago-based Cambium Networks. “The Autopilot platform gives us the agility to test and improve our marketing performance throughout the entire customer lifecycle.”
To learn more about Autopilot’s self-service free trial for marketing automation, visit www.autopilothq.com. Pricing starts at $20 per month for 1,000 contacts.
