Zaius, which combines a unified customer database with email and Web site marketing execution, has raised a $30 million Series B funding, bringing its total to $50.8 million. Zaius calls itself a “B2C CRM”: it allows some CDP-style access to its data but its focus is on providing an integrated marketing system.

Several readers have expressed concern for Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern who was reprimanded last week for publishing without permission. He’s fine, folks. To show there’s no hard feelings we’ve let him submit this study from retail email specialist Bluecore. Key findings included that buyers are interested in products they’ve looked at before and that they like price decreases. Some other, less obvious data here as well.

With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).