Deal Radar 2009: Silverpop

Atlanta, Georgia-based Silverpop is a permission-based email marketing solutions, strategy, and services provider. Its solutions, delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), are tailored to the needs of B2C and B2B marketers. Founded in 1999, the company was originally named Activegrams, and then renamed Avienda Technologies. In 2001, the company was renamed Silverpop. It has offices in Munich, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

The company’s “Engage platform” helps marketers to create and manage multichannel marketing campaigns. Equipped with data and analytics to generate leads through landing pages, microsites, emails, direct mail, and telesales campaigns, the solution is designed to help companies make the most efficient use of their time and resources while increasing revenue and accelerating the lead-to-sales process. Silverpop’s Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz, which the company acquired in 2008) platform scores sales leads, nurtures them through the pipeline, and measures campaign return on investment. The platform helps companies make strategic decisions and demonstrate marketing ROI with reporting and analytics that follow leads from the first click through to revenue won. Its graphical user interface provides a drag-and-drop, storyboard-like editor to create campaign flow for even the most complex lead management programs.

The company serves more than 1,000 customers including Fossil, Siemens, KPN, British Sky Broadcasting, Telegraaf Media Groep, Cox Communications, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sant, EDGAROnline, Barclays Global Investors, Genesys, Shop Direct Group, Plantronics, Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Houghton Mifflin, and more.

There is no shortage of competitors, which include Responsys, Eloqua, ExactTarget, e-Dialog, iContact, Constant Contact, and AWeber. These last three are more SME-oriented but are still there to challenge Silverpop. While ExactTarget went public, e-Dialog was acquired by e-commerce firm GSI Commerce for $157 million. Eloqua is growing and although management said that it was not very concerned about competition, Silverpop is also flourishing. In September 2009, Forrester Research recognized Silverpop as one of the industry’s three leading vendors from 18 promising candidates. Further, in March 2009, the Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz), was selected as a finalist for the 2009 “Best of Breed” CODiE Awards.

Silverpop has enjoyed steady growth over the past five years. It has been profitable since 2004, had 60% y-o-y revenue growth in 2007, and has a sustained 65% compound growth rate over the past four years. In March 2008, the company received $15 million in funding from D.E. Shaw; these funds are for overseas expansion and R&D. Additional funding information was not available. Having acquired Vtrenz in 2008, Silverpop also said that it planned to focus on the acquisition of companies that automate the manual aspects of the marketing process.

Suggested Reading:
*Deal Radar 2009: Eloqua
*Deal Radar 2008: Coremetrics
*Deal Radar 2009: OrangeSoda

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2009