Say hello to moda👋 - Customer Data & Engagement Platform

TL;DR

⭐ Announcing Moda - a modern customer data and engagement platform that empowers ecommerce owners and marketers to fully leverage their customer data to fuel exceptional customer experiences that build relationships and drive growth.

We’re excited to share more about our mission and why we exist below:

• Our views on the modern ecommerce growth landscape
• What challenges marketers still face every day
• What we are building and our approach to solving the problems‍

In the age of modern ecommerce

Around a decade ago, global ecommerce sales were $572B. In 2020, it was $4.2T and it’s expected to grow by $11 trillion between 2021 to 2025 - accelerated by the pandemic, which drove businesses to accelerate digital transformation to meet the rapid change in consumer behavior.

The growth of the ecommerce industry is the result of existing brands setting up their online presence and internet-native DTC players growing. A new generation of merchants and brands don’t need physical storefronts anymore and can go from idea to execution quickly and for fairly low startup costs.

With industry maturity comes learnings and trends that help shape the future of commerce. Ecommerce and DTC brands are forced to adapt to a new rapidly shifting, technology-heavy future that requires significant investments in tools that help drive long-term sustainable growth. Some of these trends include:

• High consumer expectations fueled by tech giants' capabilities are reshaping the modern customer experience
• Rising acquisition costs are forcing brands to foster long-term relationships with their customers
• Changes in technology and privacy regulations force brands to rethink personalization
• Brands are tired of paying a high revenue share to marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, etc. to get access to their own customer base
• Navigating the post-pandemic customer journey requires the next phase of data and automation

Understanding the modern ecommerce landscape

The principles of consumer marketing have not changed (build long-term loyalty!) but new technologies have brought about new ways to tackle the age-old challenge.

The best ecommerce marketers focus on

• Understanding their customers' needs and behaviors extremely well - Getting a holistic view of the customers' interests, intent, behaviors, preferences, and purchases
• Tailoring the right marketing message to the right customers at the right time - Crafting the ultimate route to conversion with journey optimization
• Highly engaging and personalized content that builds loyalty - Talk to them like you know them extremely well and build valuable long-term relationships
• Increase customer lifetime value by delivering exceptional experiences across the customer’s journey - Stitch complex combinations of experiences tailored to the customers’ behavior

But executing these growth experiences is extremely difficult at scale. Why is this so hard?

• Customer data required to tailor experiences for customers is hard to access - Data living across many apps and bringing it together in realtime requires multiple complex and expensive tools and people.
• Automated growth experiences are complex and hard to design - Understanding how to design the logic and timing in building personalized consumer experiences is difficult and most marketers end up using simple campaigns instead.
• Delivering realtime omnichannel experiences and measuring attribution is difficult - The data infrastructure required to enable accurate marketing attribution and real-time experiences are costly and difficult.
• Nearly impossible for non-technical users to have full control - Marketers are mostly non-technical team members who will need to enlist the help of agencies or technical users to execute.

Ultimately marketers choose the easier way to deliver standard campaigns and the subpar experiences constantly fail to deliver growth in competitive environments. This is typically also because there’s so much else to do in the operations as well.

Enter the modern ecommerce stack

The modern ecommerce stack is a set of software tools that are used to execute the various aspects of running an ecommerce business, ranging from 5 to 12 apps on average per merchant (storefront, logistics, fulfillment, marketing, shipping, support etc.)

While these software tools allow the merchant to run their business effectively, the merchant is left with disparate data sets sitting in siloed applications. Simple questions and actions that need to be taken by a merchant, specifically when it involved data from different apps in the stack, have so far been an impossible task. How does a merchant get a cohesive picture of what’s happening across their organization, make decisions and most importantly take action with a unified single source of truth?

• How can I get a holistic view of my customers and segments? - That is, what is the average lifetime value of people who left reviews?
• How can I hyper-personalize experiences and content using multiple data sources? That is. how can I show a customer their loyalty points earned + next purchase voucher in the same order confirmation email?

Introducing Moda, a modern customer data and engagement platform for the modern ecommerce ecosystem

As founders of an enterprise data startup, we embarked on building a solution that would democratize complex data technologies for businesses of any size. We understand the complexities of ETL/RETL and data warehouse processes. We also understand how powerful hyper-personalization and automation can be if applied correctly. We spoke to dozens of ecommerce and DTC brands to learn their pain points and challenges. We discovered that modern ecommerce businesses want to become the custodian of their customer data and take charge of their growth.

So we started Moda to build the ultimate toolset to empower marketers to own the modern ecommerce stack, so they can own their growth.
Instant and easy data integration

No-code customer data platform that has built-in identity resolution to enable instant access to 100+ data sources. -> To enable easy and quick use of proven templates and playbooks that drive growth and retention.
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Unified ecommerce analytics

Unified ecommerce analytics that uncovers a goldmine of insights to set yourself apart from your competitors. -> To understand customers better, build advanced segmentation and take optimized actions.
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Visual experience automation builder

A simple drag & drop workflow automation builder powered by the vast customer data that makes it easy to visualize an experience. -> To build and deliver personalized and automated marketing experiences that delight and retain customers.
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Hyper-personalized & omnichannel messaging

Easily insert data-driven elements into emails and SMSes to hyper-personalize communication and promotions (instant messaging, web push, etc coming soon) -> To craft unique and personalized messages across multiple channels at scale.
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No-code growth templates

Access a library of 300+ templates for data integrations, experience automation, and message personalization. -> To enable easy and quick use of proven templates and playbooks that drive growth and retention.

We’ve seen the impact of data on modern businesses and we hope to continue building features that help drive this mission and build a community of marketers that help one another drive growth. We believe the Moda platform and community will fundamentally change the way ecommerce marketers leverage customer data and grow their businesses.

Sign up for our beta

We are working with a group of brands for our closed beta. Sign up for early access here and we will reach out to you to get access to our platform when it is ready.

Interested in building the future for modern ecommerce?

Join our team of trailblazers made up of superstar engineers and product-led growth marketers. Click here to see our career opportunities.