Berlin-Based Talon.One Furthers its Incentives Engine Following €114m Funding

Earlier this year, promising German startup Talon.One secured itself a hefty round of funding thanks to its innovative promo tech. Promising to further its incentives engine, several major investors piled €114 million into the company following an impressive run of collaborations.

Enhancing How Brands Use Customer Incentives

The Talon.One incentives engine gives businesses the ability to refine their approach to promotions. The aim of it is to bring together the elements of promotions, loyalty programs, and gamification into one platform that draws on an array of data sources. From there, a business can tailor a new marketing program that can be personalised.

Going forward, with an extra €114 million at their disposal, Talon.One will be powering up its artificial intelligence elements that power intelligent and predictive insights. Seeing this potential, and the strength of the tool already, Silversmith Capital Partners, Meritech Capital, and CRV were happy to pump in funds.

To date, major names like H&M, Adidas, Costa Coffee, Sephora, and Nordstrom have all benefited from an integration of the Talon.One engine. A few months after the funding was announced, Shopify was added to that list. Their loyalty engine is now integrated natively with Shopify Enterprise, enabling real-time, data-driven incentives to be deployed at checkout.

Tapping into Personalisation is the Next Step for Business

The German startup has burst into an arena that has long been predicted as a game-changer for business and marketing. Already, Europe’s digital advertising market earns revenue in excess of €95 billion, with ad spending forecast to exceed €183 billion. There’s a lot of money in the arena despite somewhat limited personalisation.

So far, the main approach from businesses that lean heavily into promotions has been either to put a huge range of offers or run select offers in a timely manner. On the former, you can look to the example of an online casino, and the variety of promotions it offers around the slots welcome bonus. At the time of writing, there were six different promos on the go.

These ranged from weekly prizes for players, prize draws, leaderboards with cash prizes, and slot bonuses for newly released or special focus games. As an example of time-limited offers, the Carrefour app has a dedicated coupon section. With this, all users can claim a select coupon for that week and use it on their next shop.

Incentive approaches like these do work in that they have the potential to attract a whole range of customers with different preferences. So, they have strong shop window appeal, as it were. Where engines like Talon.One look to make the approach more effective is to take all of these options, pick and tailor ones that suit a specific customer based on their data, and then send it their way.

The personalised approach to marketing and incentives schemes is hailed as the next big step, provided that the tech is there to realise its potential. With Talon.One, the European startup scene has a strong entry into this field that will continue to develop its AI and create an even more refined and useful engine for businesses to use.