MailChimp, which has already expanded beyond email into marketing automation, is now adding an online storefront and appointment-booking. A free-ish version of the storefront has no monthly fee, although users pay 2% of revenues. Or, users can pay $10 or $29 per month in exchange for lower transaction rates.
Market research firm Numerator is joining the omni-channel measurement wars with a new marketing share measurement system that fixes the problems with retail sales data, which now capture less than half of all purchases. The system achieves this magic by using a 1+ million household panel. Numerator was bought earlier this month by Kantar for $1.5 billion.
Omni-channel messaging platform MessageBird announced a $600 million acquisition of email optimization platform SparkPost, $1 billion Series C extension (from the previous $200 million), and entry to the U.S. market. We also just learned that MessageBird bought the Hull.io CDP at the end of March, along with video platform 24sessions. The deals strengthen MessageBird’s competitive position against Twilio, which you will recall bought the Segment CDP last year.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.