Lyris Buys E-Mail Deliverability Company
The e-mail service provider is working to address an area of perceived weakness.
E-mail service provider Lyris Technologies has acquired Piper Software, a small firm that makes hosted deliverability tools. Financial details weren’t disclosed.
Piper offers an array of products designed to ensure email marketing messages get past spam filters and can be read in a variety of email clients. Lyris hopes to cross-sell the products to its customer base of over 4,000 clients. The larger company made the purchase at least partially in response to a JupiterResearch report issued in August, which found deliverability to be an area of weakness for Lyris.
“Legitimate email marketers have a pretty big challenge in front of them,” said Steven Brown, vice president of marketing for Lyris. “They have to recognize that just because they think they’re doing the right thing, that doesn’t mean that their mail will get through.”
The challenging email environment has resulted in a big market for deliverability solutions. Rather than developing or buying tools themselves, however, email service providers (ESPs) have tended to partner with players like Return Path or Pivotal Veracity. The newest entrant in the space, which debuted in September, is Enhance Rate.
Piper’s of toolset is called QuickProofs. The first component, Delivery Monitor, tells marketers in real time whether emails were delivered to the inbox, to spam folders or were blocked outright. The company also makes software, Inbox Capture, which analyzes messages to ensure they render properly in email clients. Another product, Content Analyzer, tests messages to determine if they’re likely to be filtered as spam. The company also monitors whether users’ IP addresses are on any blacklists.
Lyris plans both to integrate the Piper software with its own ListManager and ListHosting software, and to continue to sell it as a standalone product.
“I would expect that, by the end of the year, we’ll have at least part of the QuickProofs system incorporated into ListManager and ListHosting,” said Brown. “Over the course of Q1, we will integrate more of it.”
Lyris will bring aboard at least five employees, the overwhelming majority of Piper Software’s workforce. They’ll continue to work from the company’s offices in Simi Valley, Calif. and Loveland, Colo.
