Forrester coined the term “zero party data” in 2018 to describe data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand and we are really starting to see what that means years later. For e-commerce companies, this data can serve a number of purposes including driving personalization, marketing attribution, and building customer profiles. EnquireLabs is a martech platform that enables brands to seamlessly build a programmable stack of post-purchase questions that can be easily integrated into a brand’s existing stack. While consumer feedback surveys have been around for a while, they are static, stagnant, and typically onerous for consumers to fill out, leading to dismal completion rates. EnquireLabs’ technology integration is contextual at the very moment a customer is most willing to share insights, providing a quick and easy way to generate nearly unlimited types of feedback for things like the checkout experience, how they discovered the brand, or even insights specific to the product they purchased. This rich data can be analyzed in the platform’s own dashboard or be sent via integrations with popular services across the brand’s stack for services like Google Analytics, Alloy, Shopify Flow, and Recharge. EnquireLabs’ has over 2000 customers that are using the company’s programmable question integration for a growing variety of use cases. Response rate has been 3x over the industry average as compared to traditional survey technology, yielding an impressive 50%+ response rate. As society’s dependency on e-commerce increases and there are more options for consumers, brands are placing an emphasis on building deeper relationships with their customers and EnquireLabs’ technology solutions enable merchants to develop, optimize, nurture, and monetize these relationships at scale without relying on third-party data.
AlleyWatch caught up with EnquireLabs CEO and Cofounder Matt Bahr to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $5M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$4.5M Seed round, led by True Ventures with participation from FiDi Ventures, V1.VC, Hawke Ventures, and Silicon Ventures, along with notable angel investors and DTC leaders including the founders of Chubbies, Ted Wang, Harris Barton, Daphne Carmeli, and Casey Armstrong.
Tell us about the product or service that EnquireLabs offers.
If you’ve ever bought anything off a brand’s Instagram feed or podcast ad, you’ve probably interacted with our product. E-commerce brands use us to ask consumers questions in the right context, so their responses can be turned into automated actions. For example: you buy a yoga mat from Brand X; we ask you what your level of yoga experience is and you respond “beginner”; we send this data point to Brand X’s email platform so the first email you get minutes later is “how to take care of your yoga mat” instead of “enter to win a guest trainer spot on our video series.”
What inspired the start of EnquireLabs?
I was consulting for a few NYC-based e-commerce brands who were starting to hit friction with the popular mid-2010s approach of “just buy Facebook ads and scale.” We just decided to go back to basics by surveying customers to get some ground truth on marketing attribution, which was useful research, but couldn’t be fed to all the dials and levers of a modern marketing stack. Bridging that gap was the obvious opportunity to me, having been in the space for over a decade and watching brands rent their customer relationships from a platform like Facebook that was on the decline.
How is EnquireLabs different?
We apply speed & scale to consumer insights. Traditional surveys act as occasional, in-depth & intensive ways of learning about your customer and market, which is great — but when your brand is running a slew of marketing automations and product integrations, there’s a big opportunity to get quick feedback that can impact the next moment in the customer journey. That’s what we do. We ask questions to your customers in context, and then tell the rest of your marketing stack what it needs to hear.
What market does EnquireLabs target and how big is it?
Our primary focus is servicing direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, which is expanding massively for a few obvious reasons — one of which is that there are so many optimization levers you can pull when you have a direct relationship with your customer, but those levers disappear once you agree to stick your product on some retailer’s shelf.
What’s your business model?
Every capability we have is built into every plan, and we charge brands based on order volume. Once you become a customer of ours, we have nothing else to sell you — and that’s important to us because we are educating this space in the midst of a data revolution. The more questions you ask your consumers, the more value you get out of our product.
What are your post-COVID office plans?
We’re remote-first but as NYC locals, we’d gladly have new team members join who are close enough to meet up. The city is unparalleled for that kind of opportunity to engage, whether it’s in our FiDi office or a café or the ferry.
What was the funding process like?
We were fortunate to be very picky about who we brought on as investors, thanks in large part to our prior group of investors and advisors.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
You know one of the timeless challenges is whether or not to take money from investors who don’t share the vision. I’m grateful and proud to say everyone on our cap table agrees consumers are the ground truth for building future-proof commerce.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
This is one any of your readers could see coming: we’re in the business of helping brands better understand their customers, and until recently they were using Facebook/Instagram as their crutch. Recent data privacy initiatives and pro-consumer trends basically kicked that crutch away, so here we are. If you want to build a sustainable direct-to-consumer business, you have to get your data direct-from-consumer.
This is one any of your readers could see coming: we’re in the business of helping brands better understand their customers, and until recently they were using Facebook/Instagram as their crutch. Recent data privacy initiatives and pro-consumer trends basically kicked that crutch away, so here we are. If you want to build a sustainable direct-to-consumer business, you have to get your data direct-from-consumer.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Building out our team, for one thing! We got this far on a skeleton crew… there’s so much more value we could be delivering to our clients (and by extension, consumers), and a handful of key hires are going to unlock that value.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
We almost didn’t take VC money because there are so many options these days for businesses that are capital-efficient and revenue-generating. If you’ve got a market here—and I can’t imagine who wouldn’t—get to revenue. The doors of opportunity open so much wider at that point.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We have 2,000 brands today, and many of them aren’t even scratching the surface of what they can do with us. Between feature rollouts and education, the goal is to have our success and our customers’ success scale mutually.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
I lived in Gowanus for a long time, so I’m always gonna go with Pig Beach.
