• by Jess Nelson , April 7, 2016

Sailthru announced the acquisition of mobile marketing automation platform Carnival.io on Wednesday, expanding its personalized marketing platform with added mobile features. The financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Carnival’s Mobile Marketing Suite is now integrated with Sailthru’s Customer Retention Cloud, adding automated and data-driven mobile messaging to the personalized marketing platform.

“Mobile devices have become embedded in our daily lives and marketers need an easy way to tap into this dramatic shift in consumer behavior,” states Neil Lustig, CEO of Sailthru.  “Mobile cannot be treated as another channel; it is not an island.”

Sailthru’s technology is based on more than 1.7 billion individual customer profiles, informed by a multichannel combination of email, Web, mobile, social and offline behavioral data. Sailthru’s Personalization Engine uses these multichannel profiles to offer real-time personalized content recommendations across channels, including email.

Carnival’s Mobile Marketing Suite enables marketers to automate mobile messaging, such as push notifications and in-app messaging, with relevant content based on customer behavior, location and demographic data.

Carnival has grown quickly since launching in 2013, and now powers the mobile messaging of global brands including Coca-Cola, Penguin Random House and Air New Zealand.

 “Sailthru and Carnival share a commitment to improving retention and the long-term value of relationships between brands and customers,” states Guy Horrocks, CEO, Carnival. “Both of our businesses are built for modern marketers: with Sailthru, you have an extremely powerful engine able to provide true personalization at scale. At Carnival we share this vision and have built an intuitive mobile platform for marketers. By making it extremely easy-to-use, we save marketers time and increase their opportunities for success in the rapidly evolving mobile landscape.”

Sailthru’s client roster of retail and online publishing customers includes The Economist, Business Insider, Rent The Runway and JustFab.