For New York-based Snaps Media Inc., emojis are serious business.

The startup helps Fortune 500 companies such as Marriott International Inc. and Nike Inc. extend marketing campaigns to the mobile messaging services in which consumers are spending a growing portion of their time. Today, it announced the completion of a $6 million financing round led by early-stage fund Signal Peak Ventures.

Snaps offers a toolkit called the Conversational Marketing Cloud that aims to ease the task of targeting mobile audiences. Companies can use the platform to create chatbots, promotional emoji packs for services such as Facebook Messenger and Alexa Skills. A visual analytics console then provides the ability to centrally monitor how much engagement is generated across the different mediums.

The platform can display the number of users that a campaign reaches, how many become paying customers and key activity trends along with more platform-specific metrics. That could, for example, include what promotional graphics are shared the most on social media. A built-in split testing tool lets marketers experiment with different content variations to learn what works best.

The Conversational Marketing Cloud is finding use in a wide range of areas. Snaps said the toolkit helps power promotional campaigns across the retail, media, travel and hospitality industries among others. Some companies are also using the offering’s chatbot capabilities to build virtual assistants for handling customer service inquiries.

Snaps claims to have recorded a 200 percent increase in sales over the past year thanks to this demand, though it’s not providing absolute numbers. The startup will use the capital from the new funding round to expand into more markets, as well as geographically. One of the first items on the agenda is opening an office in the U.K. to start targeting international brands.

Meanwhile, other startups are also benefiting from the rise of mobile chat services. One of the latest examples is Seattle-based ZipWhip Inc., which raised $22.5 million in September for its namesake communications platform. The service enables companies to send and receive messages via their customer support numbers without any technical heavy lifting.

Image: Unsplash