San Francisco, Calif. – Flowtown, the social marketing platform that helps businesses transform their email contacts into engaged customers, announced that it has raised $750K in seed funding.
The funding comes from a prominent group of angel investors, including: Mitch Kapor (founder of the Lotus Development Corporation)
According to Flowtown co-founder Ethan Bloch, the funding will be used to grow the team, with particular focus on hiring passionate Ruby developers.
Flowtown bridges the divide between traditional email campaigns and social media. The service transforms a list of email contacts into meaningful demographic and socialgraphic data — instantly showing a company who their customers are and where they spend time on the social web. It's a simple, yet powerful approach that makes social engagement more relevant, personal, and effective. Additionally, Flowtown sorts customers by influence scores, so companies can easily identify and engage with potential ambassadors who can help spread their message.
"Email has been left behind in the social evolution. But with Flowtown, the simple email address unlocks tremendous insight about customers. Businesses can now actually see the people behind the addresses, enabling them to better tailor how and where they engage," explained Bloch. "In short, Flowtown gives businesses the right tools to build stronger and more personal relationships with their customers."
Dubbed the Constant Contact of social media, Flowtown is focused on empowering small businesses to embrace social media and achieve a real return on their social investments. The service seamlessly integrates into the existing small business workflow — making popular tools such as MailChimp, iContact, CampaignMonitor, BatchBook, and Wufoo even more powerful. And with the ability to derive rich and meaningful data from the social web, the Flowtown platform opens itself to a wealth of compelling social media opportunities for small businesses.
Flowtown co-founders Ethan Bloch and Dan Martell are serial entrepreneurs, respected voices in online marketing, and passionate advocates for small businesses. Witnessing the challenges most companies face when trying to engage in social media, the two were determined to build a product that delivers Social Media ROI for small businesses.
Since its launch in November 2009, the company reports 35% month-over-month customer growth with more than 15,000 businesses now on Flowtown. The Flowtown blog (http://www.flowtown.com/
