• by Jess Nelson , March 15, 2017

Email marketing services provider Campaign Monitor announced the acquisition of Tagga, a customer data platform, for an undisclosed price on Wednesday.

Marketers can benefit from more data-driven targeting and personalization by combining Tagga’s customer data platform with Campaign Monitor’s email marketing and automation software.

“Marketers are really moving towards personalization across all channels, because it drives more engagement and more revenue,” says Andrea Wildt, the recently hired new chief marketing officer at Campaign Monitor. The previous Campaign Monitor CMO, Kraig Swensrud, was recently promoted to chief strategy officer. 

The goal of the acquisition is “to deliver a next-generation B2C CRM that democratizes behavioral customer data” for companies of all sizes, says Wildt.

The acquisition marks Campaign Monitor’s pivot to the CRM market, an industry that Gartner predicts will grow from $26.3 billion in 2015 to $36 billion by the end of 2017.

This acquisition does not deter Campaign Monitor’s focus on the small- to medium-sized business, however, and Wildt expresses her excitement about brining a CRM platform to the market without the higher price pain points of enterprise marketing cloud solutions like Salesforce. 

Wildt says the CRM market has largely been built on a B2B account-based model, and that there is a lack of accessible behavioral data in the SMB market.

“It’s really about puling in all of this rich behavioral data -- pulling data from disparate places into one location that people can act on,” says Wildt.

Tagga will provide an underlying data structure for Campaign Monitor to pull behavioral data from and unite fragmented data sources into a unified source of truth. 

Campaign Monitor will also be acquiring Tagga’s book of business, including large retail clients such as Adidas and Red Bull. 

Tagga and Campaign Monitor have one mutual customer, Flight Centre Travel Group, that experienced a boost in engagement and online bookings by leveraging the two solutions simultaneously. Flight Centre increase email click-through rates by 57%, while also boosting Web traffic 30% and online bookings by 11%.

A Tagga API is already available on Campaign Monitor’s app store, so customers have already had the ability to utilize the two solutions together to boost their customer communication.

Wildt says Campaign Monitor’s product team is already working on integrating Tagga into Campaign Monitor’s core platform, and she expects a beta solution to be live by the end of the year.