A Yorkshire tech firm analysing big data using A.I to optimise clients marketing spend. The NPIF–Maven Equity Fund invested £1.35 million, alongside the £300,000 from the Maven VCTs.
eSalesHub will invest the new funds to scale the business and develop its A.I technology. Expansion is expected to create 25 new jobs including technology and data science, business development and sales and marketing at the company’s Doncaster head office.
“The time is right to accelerate our growth and invest across the business in our proven technology solutions to expand their take-up and unlock new A.I applications,” said CEO and founder Mark Taylor.
eSalesHub operates in the £2.5bn UK data analytics and insights market, with an existing product suite that covers call centre and recruitment media, tracking and analysis. In terms of call tracking, the trend in recent years to online shopping has been mirrored with growth in online marketing, which in 2020 is estimated to account for 69p of every £1 of UK marketing spend.
Despite the growth in online, tracking sales from online clicks through offline sales remains important. Click through calls from Google alone are estimated by the Company to exceed 750,000 every day, as consumers require human interaction before making purchases of goods and services. This has created problems for marketers, who have been unable to track the customer journey when it shifts from online to offline, making measurement of digital marketing success, impossible.
eSalesHub’s technology was developed to solve this problem, connecting the on and offline customer journey. The technology automates call tracking, covering both the classification of calls into categories such as Sales, Customer Service or Supplier and also tracks each call through to its outcome. This provides clients, including British Gas, Connells Estate Agency and Europcar, with full marketing attribution back to the initial keywords that triggered the enquiry, enabling marketing departments to measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing spend.
Regarding recruitment, large companies typically lack integrated systems to track the original source of the applicants who have proved to be both their best and worst employees in terms of ability and retention. The company’s recruitment solution combines the source of applicants with payroll and other internal data to measure the success of direct hires from different media channels.
“Our A.I technology has the power to analyse 10,000 customers calls in 0.2 seconds, providing clients with a real time, complete view of the customer journey, actionable customer insights and an average 20 per cent more value from their Google spend,” said Mark Taylor, CEO and founder of eSalesHub. “However, we are only just scratching the surface of the A.I. opportunity and have ambitious plans for expansion beyond our current call centre and recruitment product suite. The backing of NPIF and Maven Capital Partners will enable us to triple the local workforce and bring more high quality tech jobs to Yorkshire. We will grow our sales and marketing team to raise awareness of our proven product suite, combined with increased investment in technology and business development to extend the application of A.I as we seek to become Yorkshire’s leading technology business.”
