Tackling big industries can produce huge results. Austin serial entrepreneur Bob Fabbio knows this as well as almost anyone. He built, grew and successfully exited several tech businesses, including Tivoli, Ventix Systems and DAZEL Corporation.
In Fabbio's newest venture, marketing engagement startup eRelevance Corp, he is following some of the same steps he has in the past.
“Our strategy has always been to go vertically deep in an industry for two to three years, start to master it, sell into it repeatably and then move to the next and then, over time, to the next," he recently told me.
For eRelevance, founded in 2013, that meant starting with a patient engagement business in the health industry. They pivoted slightly to focus on elective healthcare before honing in on the aesthetics industry, which includes dermatology, plastic surgery and dental work. Overall, the company has raised $13.7 million from Rally Ventures, Chicago Ventures, Miramar Venture Partners, Martin Investment Holdings and Capital Factory.
The elective healthcare industry is a relatively challenging industry to sell to, Fabbio said, because you often have to work through office staff and deal with delays getting doctors to finally hear a pitch. But they've been breaking through and adding hundreds of new customers.
As Fabbio and his team explored other industries earlier this year, they were compelled by the lack of marketing sophistication in the mortgage lending industry. They also quickly realized it's much easier to reach mortgage lenders, who often have emails and cell phone numbers on their LinkedIn page, than to reach doctors.
While mortgage lenders are no strangers to marketing, often using Constant Contact or MailChimp to help engage clients, Fabbio said eRelevance has very little competition in providing an engagement marketing service that uses both tech platforms and professional marketing and content campaign professionals.
Fabbio said he has yet to pitch a company that says it has heard similar presentations.
“They either choose to do it or they don’t," Fabbio said. "What we’re doing is really novel and unique, so they really literally decide in an hour presentation whether they’re going to stay wed to using Constant Contact or MailChimp to do email blasting, or they’re going to choose to do something more sophisticated like the Fortune 1000 does.”
The startup's clients can drum up new marketing campaigns by filling out a campaign request form, which takes a couple minutes, and then eRelevance can build out a campaign in about an hour, allow the client to review it and then launch the campaign.
Fabbio said eRelevance's combination of human and tech tools provides far more targeted engagement than, say, blasting an email to a full list of past clients or a lead generation database.
“We’re highly disruptive to the software players and to the marketing consultants who use those software tools," he said. “Our vision is to ultimately displace the use of email software tools by the small business sectors with our service.”
He said they’ve already done it with 1,400 small businesses.
“We’re just going to keep displacing more and more," he said.
