We all like the personal touch. We like to go into our favourite shop or restaurant and be recognised, welcomed and treated like an individual.

Marketing is no different – show us something relevant to us and you’re more likely to get our attention. Make it a truly tailored and personalised experience and the response will be even better. And of course the opposite applies - if you bombard us with irrelevant, even inappropriate, messaging and content then at best you will get indifference and at worse a brand-damaging, hostile response. That’s why personalisation is widely seen as a game-changer in the marketing space with a huge amount of buzz around it.

Criteo’s $2.3bn valuation following its recent IPO is a testament to the perceived opportunity in the retargeting space but they focus on banner ads. Banners have woeful response rates and, whilst targeted content will improve these, they are still a comparatively ineffective form of marketing.

Email is widely acknowledged as a far more productive medium – second only to paid search - but it is limited to customers for whom you have an email address / permission. Furthermore less than 5% of marketing email has any kind of personalisation. Surely then there must be a massive opportunity if you can deliver personalised content in email, at scale and tailored in real-time to optimise response? How big? Well somewhere between Criteo and Google - and that’s big!

At Notion we like AdTech and marketing automation – as our investments in AdBrain, IDIO and Rockabox all show. And we know a fair bit about email from our MessageLabs days where we delivered over a billion a day. So the lack of apparent innovation in the email marketing space has somewhat vexed us. Yes there are great tools like Mailchimp and others to make managing your email communications easier. And there are some good campaign tools like Responsys. But no-one has really unlocked the opportunity to deliver real-time tailored content in email to the customers for whom you have a permission / record, let alone the much bigger opportunity to get this content in front of the people for whom you do not.

And then I met the team from Mojn….

Mojn – which rhymes with coin and means Hello – is a Danish tech start-up that addresses this huge opportunity and, as such, we believe can build a big and valuable business. Today they announced a $4m Series A funding led by Northzone and Notion Capital and we are delighted to welcome them to the Notion family.

Mojn delivers personalised marketing content across a wide spectrum of media. Yes, they do banner retargeting and can compete effectively with the players in that space with several differentiated features (language agnosticity being one). But it is their Performance Email Targeting product that is truly a game-changer, delivering tailored and targeted content in real-time through email (i.e. the content is determined in milliseconds upon opening the email based on the profile, tastes and previous shopping habits of that individual). And it can get this content in front of millions of users for whom the brand or e-commerce site do not have an email address or permission, leveraging other members of the Mojn ecosystem who do. The performance data on this is truly stellar with 5 fold uplifts in click throughs and a large increase in conversions.

What we also really like about Mojn is that implementation is entirely frictionless – a simple script on your website and a pixel in your email and its working. And the customer only pays for performance uplifts so there is a great alignment of interests and a compelling proposition for any marketing director tasked, as so many are, with getting more for less.

They’re a cracking team ranging from Ph.D.’s to serial entrepreneurs – and like lots of the Danes we work with, just a little bit crazy. We are looking forward to sharing their journey with them.

In other news, Notion invests $9m into the rocket driving the Direct Booking Movement.