500friends gets $5M to tell you who your best customers are — online and in-store

500friends is in the business of making you money through loyalty programs. But it looks like the company just got its own bit of cash from a $5 million second round of funding led by Intel Capital.

Fung Capital and Crosslink Capital also participated in the round, bringing 500friends’ total funding up to $12 million.

Loyalty programs help a business see what kinds of people are interested in the brand, and it provides an easy marketing channel. There’s a lot of data that can live inside a loyalty program, and that’s what 500friends tries to use to your company’s advantage.

As TechCrunch points out, 500friends’ loyalty software-as-a-service product takes all that information about your customer base and analyzes it to find the customers who are most likely to return and who are of “high value” to the business. It then allows you to target them with special deals and offers separately from the rest of the pack. The SaaS product further lets you manage your promotions, set up rewards and points programs, and otherwise communicate with those customers.

It is further introducing a similar kind of support to those in-store as well. Associates are given iPads that control rewards on the company’s side, whereas the consumer has an app that, when location-based services are turned on, can push location-specific deals.

Shopping cart image via Shutterstock