In my opinion, these are the nine startups that should be on your radar in 2016.

Minute 

With video marketing now more popular than ever before, the importance of a good thumbnail has never been greater.

Choosing the right one, however, has consistently proved a headache for marketers.

Minute does away with the thumbnail altogether, instead utilising a short highlight from the video, dynamically chosen and optimised in order to enhance video CTR, in some cases by over 100%.

Tickr

Designed to offer increased transparency on marketing activity to an entire business, Tickr takes data from across departments and collates it in one intuitive, real time user interface.

As the lines between marketing channels and other business activities become increasingly blurred, the ability to access information from across the board in an easily digestible format is an invaluable one.

LeadPages

As the online commerce landscape becomes more congested and competitive, having highly effective landing pages has never been more important.

LeadPages provides numerous templates to businesses, including ones which have already proved their mettle for other companies, and then offers them vital analytical insights, including the ability to sort pages by conversion rate.

The lessons from these optimisations can then be applied to other pages, such as 404 pages, to maximise their usefulness.

Olapic

With free-to-use stock photography frequently being overused and the cost of using paid-for images quickly adding up, many ecommerce brands have sought to utilise crowd sourced imagery from their customers instead.

Olapic collects vast quantities of user-generated content and presents it to brands in an intelligent, easy to curate manner, generating a library of unique imagery.

Brands can then easily request usage rights of certain images in order to use them in marketing materials. 

Pepipost 

Pepipost intends to disrupt the long-established pricing structures of email platforms such as MailChimp by only charging brands for the emails they send which aren’t opened by their customers.

As well as their unusual pricing plan, which aims to reward good marketing and brands that have a strong rapport with their email base, the platform also offers custom ‘Triggerware’ for sending automated emails at certain points in the user journey when on-site.

Slack 

One of the hottest properties in Silicon Valley currently, Slack is an open channel messaging app that incorporates various project management features to encourage real time discussion and the active exchange of ideas.

Many pieces of software have been touted as the thing to finally kill email, and with a list of customers that reads like a who’s who of the most respected and most exciting new companies around, Slack may just be the first to truly earn the title.

Cart Defender

Abandonment rates of baskets have long been a major problem point in online commerce, with average rates of nearly 70% representing a huge missed opportunity for retailers.

Cart Defender utilises machine learning to analyse baskets and attempt to estimate when one is likely to be abandoned.

It then decides on one of a variety of actions to take – be it an email, an incentivised pop-up or otherwise – in order to try and prevent the abandonment.

Yoyo Wallet  

As well as offering a simple transaction engine, Yoyo Wallet collects important basket data during every transaction that it processes, enabling retailers to build up composite profiles of each of their customers.

This information can then be used to inform everything from email segmentation to social retargeting.

Yoyo Wallet themselves offer a mobile push notification system that can intelligently target customers based on behaviour or the time of day that they’re most likely to purchase.

Perfect Banner

Google’s Display Network is, for many, still something of a mystery when compared to the core AdWords search product.

Perfect Banner aims to alleviate some of the confusion by allowing businesses to create multiple variants of a single banner.

The platform then integrates with an AdWords account and mixes and matches different elements in the banner until it hits upon the best performing variant, which can then help to inform your future display campaigns, as well as helping to optimise on-site assets.