Featured Startup Pitch: Bangalore-based WebMobi has big plans to make mobile marketing more effective for Indian businesses

By Sachin Anand, WebMobi founder

Elevator Pitch: The WebMobi MRM platform provides push messaging that allows companies to deliver rich content like text, image, videos, audio, and HTML5 pages to their mobile app users, and provides rules to enhance targeting.

Product Description

With WebMobi’s MRM platform, you can send push notifications—a new communication channel which promotes two-way interactions between a company and its customers and improves targeting. WebMobi’s platform allows you to send not only text but also images, audio, videos or rich HTML pages in push notifications. The push message pops in on a user’s home screen or notification window, and thus has a very high rate of readability.

With features like associating an event with a push message (for example, opening a particular page in a mobile app or web browser), it enables users to shorten customer purchase- or decision-making cycles by communicating the information which is most relevant to the customer. The platform also captures events like notification click, open rate, delivery rate, etc., which can be used in analyzing specific user behavior (analytics) for better engagement.

WebMobi’s platform allows custom tag creation to create a list of targeted recipients for sending push messages. For example, tags can be based on user profile, in-app behavior, preferences or anything that suits your business requirements. The platform is coupled with a smart location detection mechanism, which gives you a filter based on a user’s real-time location.

Push messages can be used in any industry like retail, education, healthcare or any business which involves information sharing. It can even be used for internal communication within the organization. Companies can use it for sending promotional offers, coupons, sharing news and announcements, polls, quizzes or anything your business requires.

Screenshot of WebMobi push notification dashboard.

Founder’s Story

Over the past few years, the mobile phone has transformed from just a phone used for making and receiving calls to a hyper-productive business tool. Mobile marketing is a highly used term, and is changing the way conventional marketing works.

I anticipated this opportunity way back in 2011, when I left my job and started this company in the Bay Area in the U.S. Soon, I realized the potential for growth in the Indian market, and thus relocated the company’s headquarters to Bangalore in late 2012. Puzzled by questions like:

-As mobile transforms the world, how will it transform your business?

-How can it help you better engage your constantly-connected customers?

-How can you go mobile rapidly without worrying about the technology involved?

-How mobile can be used to get new customers and thus build business?

My team and I worked hard to develop a platform which could be integrated with mobile apps to make them a powerful and effective marketing tool. Looking at the number of SMEs in the Indian market and their growth potential, we built mobile solutions keeping in mind both SMEs and enterprise customers.

Market Opportunity

WebMobi’s MRM goes beyond the creation of apps to consider a broader, strategic approach to acquiring, converting, and retaining customers. It integrates technologies including apps, push messaging and in-app landing pages to deliver value in an individual’s preferred context.

The MRM platform is for any industry. It is intended to be used by a player for whom communicating the right information to a right set of targeted customers is important. These customers could be your end users using your product or services, or an employee of your company.

Business Model

At the moment, our revenue stream comes from two areas we focus on—creating mobile apps and selling our customer engagement platform for companies that already have a mobile app. By focusing on these two areas, it allows us to offer end-to-end solutions for business mobile needs. Our main objective is to enable both small and big businesses to go mobile and leverage maximum benefits out of it.

Current Needs

Our plans are to launch the new WebMobi mobile engagement platform with a cloud app builder for marketers in early 2014. The mobile engagement platform will enable mobile marketers to contextually target customers with rich messages and notifications. We seek a new round of funding in Q2 to expand operations and the team.

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Headquarters: Bangalore, India