Silverpop builds profiles of individuals and crafts promotions to target them
Continuing its run of digital marketer acquisitions, IBM has announced its purchase of Silverpop, which specializes in managing personally-customized Internet promotions.
Silverpop assembles profiles of individuals from social media sites, Web usage, email and other digital signals. It then can craft personalized offers and promotions based on these profiles. It can target both the business and consumer markets.
IBM plans to integrate Silverpop's technologies into its own marketing services.
"The acquisition is about delivering on mass personalization at scale and identity," wrote R "Ray" Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research, in an email he sent to reporters. "While IBM has an army of assets in play for marketing, the reality is that you need mass personalization at scale to deliver on relevancy and context."
Silverpop has 8,000 customers worldwide, including Mazda, Stonyfield Farm and Advanced Micro Devices.
Of particular interest to IBM is how Silverpop's technology can identify and understand the needs of individuals based on digital behavior.
For instance it can identify individuals interested in college savings plans based on their use of a college savings calculator. Technology early adopters can be identified by their browsing habits, and their history of tuning into webinars or downloading white papers.
IBM has amassed quite a bit of digital marketing technology and talent over the past few years. In 2012, the company acquired customer experience software vendor Tealeaf.
In 2010, IBM purchased marketing software provider Unica for US$480 million. It also purchased marketing analysis software provider Coremetrics that year.
Silverpop's technologies will be folded into the Enterprise Marketing Management portfolio of the IBM Software Group.
IBM did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, which the company expects to close by the middle of the year.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
Creating a strong company culture may sound like a daunting task, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. In fact, company culture is created in exactly the same fashion as a religion or democracy. Behaviours created from the organisation’s inception are reinforced over time by leadership, attracting like-minded people and eventually reaching critical mass to become an accepted ‘truth’.
The question I get asked most regularly these days is: ‘Do I need to rebuild my company’s systems on Blockchain?’ And the answer, every time, is ‘No, you’re asking the wrong question’.
Throughout my career, I have witnessed a litany of brand names that profess to have a unique customer value proposition (CVP). In reality, however, they’ve had little more than a ‘value proposition’: A simple list of benefits applied to a general audience.
In this bonus last episode of this new podcast series, BrandHook MD, Pip Stocks, talks with former ANZ group general manager of marketing, Louise Eyres, talks about the importance of thinking like a customer and using intuition to solve customer painpoints.
We supply petroleum product such as JP54, D2, D6, JET A1, Serious buyer should contact now for SCO in order to work with seller workable ...
Vico Peißker
ACCC releases Consumer Data Right draft framework for comment
What is your opinion about chatbots serving your customers? My belief is bots are going to be the future of customer service and fulfilme...
Giridhar Prathap Reddy
NAB taps power of AI chatbots for business customer service
Thanks for writing about chatbots. Definitely bots have the exciting future when it comes to customer engagement, transactional and conve...
Giridhar Prathap Reddy
Deloitte TMT Predictions: AR and mobile crucial for marketing success in 2018
Hi there! Thanks for this interesting article! I love to read about new technology and software that makes our lives easier. I'm looking ...
Julia Summer
Wartsila overhauls Web platforms to create ‘seamless’ brand experience across all devices
RE: Sales and marketing SLAs, often the choke point isn't the teams but them getting the data into the tools they want to use with the da...
Ed Fry
Why sales and marketing alignment is more important than ever