Omnichannel marketing automation software provider Selligent announced today the completion of its merger with email technology company Strongview. Selligent says the new combined company is now the world's largest independent provider of orchestration and engagement solutions for relationship marketers.
"One of the top reasons that Extra Space Storage works with Selligent is its clear commitment to relationship marketers," Melissa Burdon, marketing optimization director at Selligent customer Extra Space Storage, said in a statement today. "We are in the midst of a customer experience transformation, focusing on identifying pain points our customers go through on their journey with us and coming up with solutions to make their experience easier and really positive. Selligent understands the human side of marketing, and the merger with StrongView provides us with an even greater ability to engage with our customers at the right time, through the right channel, to give them an engagement that matters to them."
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The merger of Selligent and Strongview, both owned by middle-market private equity firm HGGC, is the latest in a line of mergers and acquisitions in the marketing automation space. In 2010, IBM paid $480 million to acquire Unica. In 2013, Oracle ponied up $871 million for Eloqua, and Salesforce.com came up with $2.5 billion for ExactTarget. That same year, SAP acquired Swiss marketing automation specialist Hybris (HGGC was the majority owner at the time) for between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Why the merger makes sense
HGGC says the combination of Selligent and StrongView has even more potential. In August 2015, VentureBeat ranked Selligent the fastest-growing company in the marketing automation category, citing 12 percent growth in the previous year (the category average was four percent).
StrongView brings a broad roster of U.S.-based enterprise and mid-market clients to Belgium-based Selligent, and its contextual email technology rounds out Selligent's offering, bringing together enterprise email marketing capabilities with omnichannel campaign management and targeting expertise. The combined company serves more than 700 brands in 30 countries, including Dyson, ING and InterContinental Hotels Group.
"We originally invested in Selligent earlier in the year because we see the need for an independent omnichannel platform focused specifically on marketers," HGGC CEO Rich Lawson, chairman of the combined company, said in a statement when the merger was announced last October. "Bringing StrongView's broad roster of U.S.-based enterprise and mid-market clients and its leading contextual email technology into Selligent makes the company the clear market leader. Clients will be able to select from a flexible set of consumer-first email and multichannel capabilities and enjoy top-tier service across both sides of the Atlantic."
Andre Lejeune, co-founder and CEO of Selligent, says the new combined company provides mid-market marketers with a single partner committed to meeting the needs of relationship marketers, as opposed to marketing cloud providers that are intent on selling broad solutions across many marketing functions.
"We are committed to the needs of relationship marketers and delivering on the promise of consumer-first marketing," he says. "We have what marketers at mid-market companies need — the feature breadth, ease of use and rigorous data stewardship demanded by underfunded European marketers, and the enterprise-class scale and sophistication demanded in the United States."
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