E-Mail Marketer Silverpop Buys Lead Management Firm
The move allows Silverpop to integrate lifecycle marketing campaigns with its e-mail services.
In a move that allows it to integrate lifecycle marketing campaigns with its e-mail marketing services, Atlanta-based Silverpop has acquired Vtrenz.
The Fargo, N.D.-headquartered Vtrenz makes an integrated marketing automation platform for multi-channel campaigns. The platform allows marketers to create, execute and automate campaigns as well as score and route qualified leads to sales professionals. It also provides analytics that measure the campaigns’ results.
Silverpop, headed by CEO Bill Nussey, provides permission-based, enterprise-oriented e-mail marketing, strategy and services. It has offices in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In announcing the acquisition, the company said it will now be able to provide a broad lifecycle marketing solution for B2B and B2C marketers in mid-market and enterprise organizations.
The company said the combination of technologies will make it easier for marketers to know, and act upon, their customers interests across varying channels. In a statement, Nussey noted a JupiterResearch survey, conducted last year for Silverpop, that found more than a third of e-mail marketers “struggle with a lack of actionable customer data” and about the same number find it difficult to analyze customer responses.
Vtrenz’s former CEO, Will Schnabel, was named vice president and general manager of Silverpop’s Vtrenz operation. In an interview, he said Vtrenz was founded in 1999 “and the premise of the company was to build marketing tools and a marketing platform to help marketers build a lead generation process.”
He said Vtrenz grew to have a client base of more than 250 companies. “As we continued to grow, we realized marketers need… high volume and high-scale communications,” said Schnabel. That made the acquisition by Silverpop ideal, he said.
“Silverpop is predominantly in the low-touch sales process, sending high-volume communications and optimizing them,” said Schnabel. “It can send millions of electronic communications [while] Vtrenz is focused on multi-channel marketing campaigns. Not just e-mail, but direct mail, landing pages, Web site interaction and serving tools.”
While Vtrenz will be folded into Silverpop, the companies’ sales organizations will remain substantially separate for the time being. “Over time, in one to two years, we will start to leverage the capabilities of the two product sets,” said Schnabel.
He would not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. Vtrenz has just under 40 employees who will now join Silverpop’s employee base of more than 160 people.
