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TAMPA, Fla. — Acquisitions have played a key role in IBM’s ascension to become a prominent player in the cloud-driven big data analytics space, and Big Blue completed a major acquisition by closing its deal to buy marketing automation firm Silverpop.
Indeed, at its annual Smarter Commerce Global Summit event here, IBM announced it has completed the acquisition of Silverpop, a privately held software company based in Atlanta. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Silverpop empowers marketers with cloud-based capabilities that deliver personalized customer engagements that scale for any sized business. Silverpop’s automated platform reduces the complexity of omnichannel marketing and makes it easier to personalize each customer interaction in real time, IBM said. By providing deep customer insights and an intuitive engagement engine, Silverpop enables exceptional experiences for customers across the entire brand journey.
Silverpop extends IBM’s position in marketing automation in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) scenarios. With this acquisition, more than 8,000 organizations around the world now use IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management tools. Silverpop also adds to IBM’s portfolio of more than 100 software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings that can be quickly deployed with little technical knowledge to accelerate time to value.
“Silverpop’s powerful marketing automation capabilities will be infused across IBM’s enterprise marketing portfolio to help organizations exceed expectations throughout the customer journey,” said Kevin Bishop, vice president of Customer Engagement Solutions at IBM, in a statement. “This will allow IBM to make it easier for clients of any size to acquire, retain and maximize the lifetime value of their customers.”
Silverpop makes personalization easier by automating the customer experience based on insights drawn from permission-based data streams — such as social, web, email and mobile activity. Silverpop’s engagement and lead management platform enables marketers to use these profiles to deliver unique, highly personalized experiences for each customer in real time.
For example, a retailer can determine that a customer who has repeatedly looked at a particular item on their Website has just entered their local store, enabling the retailer to send an SMS message alerting the customer, if opted in, that this item is in stock and on sale in that particular store. Or a supplier can use a behavior-based scoring model to monitor buyer engagements from first inquiry through repeat purchase, while at the same time delivering personalized messages from the local sales representative about the preferences and position of the customer in the buying cycle.
In another potential scenario, a packaged goods company can send personalized messages to their most loyal customers designed to be shared with their social networks, which helps generate positive brand awareness and increase reach when the customers rebroadcast that message to their followers.
IBM’s growing ecosystem of more than 140 Ready for Smarter Commerce marketing partners can create an even more complete view of each customer by integrating data from these additional sources into Silverpop, enabling deeper customization.