A brief history of email service provider mergers and acquisitions
It seems to be harder and harder these days to keep track of who owns who in the email service provider space. Some ESPs such as e-Dialog, Bluehornet and eCircle have changed hands at least 3 times in the last 10 years! 2013 / 2014 was arguably the biggest year for ESP acquisitions with Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe and IBM all buying up the biggest enterprise ESPs. The latest trend seems to be for private equity firms to buy an ESP or two with the aim of merging them with other marketing technologies that can compete with the larger marketing cloud. Strongview merging with Selligent or Bluehornet joining forces with Teradata are both great examples of recent mergers. So, here is a brief history of ESP acquisitions and mergers. I will add to this list as more acquisitions happen so that we can keep track of who owns who.
2003
2004
Digital River acquires Bluehornet
2005
Acxiom acquires Digital Impact for $140 million
Lyris Acquires Emaillabs for $24 million
Epsilon acquires BigFoot Interactive for $120 million
2006
Epsilon acquires DoubleClick’s email business for $90 million
2008
GSI Commerce acquires e-Dialog for $157 million
2010
Mansell Group acquires Whatcounts
2011
eBay acquires GSI Commerce (including e-dialog) for $2.4 billion
Emailvision acquires SmartFocus for $40 million
2012
Teradata acquires a German ESP called eCircle
Oracle acquires Eloqua for $810 million
Exacttarget acquires Pardot for $95.5 million
Experian acquires Conversen for undisclosed amount — This product formed the basis of Experian’s new Omnichannel product
Silverpop acquires marketing automation platform CoreMotives
2013
Salesforce acquires Exacttarget for $2.5 billion
Adobe acquires Neolane for $600 million
Oracle acquires Responsys for $1.5 billion
Deluxe acquires Vertical Response for $27 million
2014
IBM acquires Silverpop for $275 million
2015
Zeta Interactive acquires eBay e-Dialog for undisclosed amount
Aurea acquires Lyris for undisclosed amount
Selligent and Strongview merge
Marlin Equity Partners acquires Bluehornet
Endurance International acquires Constant Contact for $1 billion
Netsuite acquires Bronto for $200 million
Campaigner acquire assets of EmailDirect
2016
Zeta Interactive acquires Acxiom Impact for $50 million — Zeta now owns a few different email marketing platforms
Oracle acquires Netsuite (Including Bronto) for $9.3 billion — Oracle now owns Eloqua, Responsys and Bronto
Marlin Equity Partners acquire marketing applications, including eCircle, from Teradata
Marlin Equity Partners merges Teradata marketing applications and Bluehornet to create Mapp
Vista Equity Partners acquires Marketo for $1.79 billion
2017
Vector Capital acquires 75% of Experian’s email marketing business
