Optimove, a leading CRM marketing platform, announced it has acquired Graphyte, a real-time, cloud-based personalization platform optimizing the web and mobile experience for consumers. The announcement comes on the heels of Optimove's purchase of Kumulos, a leading provider of a personalized messaging platform for mobile applications. The combined purchase price of the two deals was not disclosed. The acquisitions help bolster Optimove as one of the most comprehensive CRM marketing platforms. Its AI-driven solutions autonomously determine the next-best-action for each customer, eliminating the need for marketers to manually map every customer journey.

When businesses can connect more personally with their customers, those customers in turn are more loyal. However, as consumer behavior changes, especially as it did over the past 18 months, it is more difficult to establish that connection amid all of the messages put in front of them. Optimove, specializing in customer relationship management marketing, wants to help brands "delight" their customers and keep them coming back. The company, with bases in Tel Aviv, New York and London, raised a $75 million growth investment led by Summit Partners. The SaaS company was founded in 2012 by CEO Pini Yakuel to connect customers with brands and to apply artificial intelligence to customer data to orchestrate the right message to the right customer at the right time, and do it at scale, Yakuel told TechCrunch. "It's easier when you are creating three or five customer journeys a month, but when you really scale and want to do thousands, there is not an easy way to do that," he added.

In this age of hyper communication and information overflow, companies often struggle to reach their customers in the manner they want to. Breaking through the clutter is not easy, and meaningful communication is scarce. While there is no dearth of channels - SMS, email, social media, in-app alerts, website pop-ups, Facebook and Google ads, digital assistants, and more - to distribute a message, it is often lost in transit or delivered to an unintended recipient, making communication lose its relevance. As a result, marketing campaigns, sometimes even large-scale ones, fail, investments and returns are not on par, people's expectations remain unmet, and eventually, brands lose customers to competition. This is what most martech companies aspire to do. Optimove has over 200 people with offices in Tel Aviv, London, and New York.

Marketers today are charged with injecting their intelligence into the process or the system, burdening themselves and not leveraging their capabilities. The new era of marketing will innately merge AI and human creativity to optimize any campaign or marketing strategy. I've been going back and forth with the concept of innately intelligent marketing for many months now. It may sound like a vague phrase devoid of much meaning, but I promise to illuminate what it means for us marketers. First, the inspiration behind the notion of innate intelligence: I'm a biology and natural science buff and, as you know, our body possesses instinct – We inhabit a wonderous machine that just knows what to do - our immune system knows when to kick in, our metabolism keeps us up and running, we have the ability to heal ourselves.

It's not uncommon for marketers and business owners to think of Marketing Automation as a scary, unreachable process. The term itself sounds a little futuristic, overwhelming and something perhaps only large enterprises are capable of applying. Well, you'll be glad to know that clever Marketing Automation needn't be ridiculously difficult. The trick is: To first know exactly what you can / need to automate, which relatively affordable tools to use, and then how to action them for outstanding results. I'm going to show you 3 nifty hacks to: In addition to automating recurring (and sometimes mundane) biz tasks, think of Marketing Automation as (typically) multiple pieces of software talking to each other, taking your website visitors through a seamless, semi-autonomous journey of nurturing until they become customers -- before another nurturing process begins, and so on.

Adore Me is tapping artificial intelligence to win over lingerie shoppers online. The four-year-old brand is part of a recent e-commerce boom in the bras and underwear space, which has seen the rise of modern, digital players set on eating into Victoria's Secret's market share. As Adore Me took on the likes of other online-born lingerie companies like True & Co., Negative Underwear and ThirdLove, it was using the "spray and pray" method of messaging customers through email marketing. "We had a one-size-fits-all strategy for reaching out to customers," said Josselin Petit-Hoang, Adore Me's marketing manager who has been with the company since 2014. "But as the company grew, and the volume of our customers grew, we wanted to narrow down, as well as reach people outside of email." Adore Me -- which has raised close to $12 million in venture capital -- did $80 million in sales in 2016 and is projected to hit $100 million in 2017, according to internal figures.