CDP Institute

It would be fitting to round out this issue with Quad’s announcement of a new direct mail platform, but the core feature – merging mail streams from several companies to reduce postage – is quite modest and I doubt you care, Dear Reader.

Marketing automation platform Selligent has been purchased by CM Group, which owns other email companies including Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Emma, and Delivra. The deal adds AI capabilities to the CM Group portfolio and will enable Selligent to expand mobile messaging, analytics, and real-time personalization. Selligent was owned by private equity firm HGGC, which bought it in 2015.

Email is apparently a hot investment right now. Email creation platform Stensul just raised a $16 million Series B, bringing total funding to $23 million. It seems odd that there’s a market for a stand-alone email builder, but, apparently, there are enough enterprise marketers wanting a best-of-breed solution to keep Stensul growing.

Two major trends in the CDP industry have been emergence of industry specialists and of CDPs built into operational platforms. Right on cue, ticketing platform TicketIQ has launched FanIQ, which creates unified customer profiles and markets against them. Whether it’s a CDP depends on whether other systems can also access its data. FanIQ also taps into TicketIQ’s 40 million user profiles, matching yet another trend: integration of third party prospect lists.