• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 22, 2006

Hoping to boost its e-mail services capabilities, technology holding company J.L. Halsey has made two new acquisitions--Web analytics company ClickTracks, and content management company Hot Banana.

ClickTracks went for $10.6 million cash and stock for ClickTracks, with the promise of up to an additional $3.81 million over the next two years; HotBanana's price tag came to around $1.7 million, with the possibility of an additional $1.1 million in the next two years. J.L. Halsey said it was financing acquisitions with a $10 million bridge loan.

The acquisitions come about one year after Halsey first entered the e-mail marketing space, with the May 2005 purchase of Lyris Technologies for $30.7 million. In October, Halsey made another move into e-mail marketing, acquiring Email Labs for $24.3 million.

With the purchase of ClickTracks and HotBanana, J.L. Halsey will number about 150 people, up from around 100. The company also will have a combined 13,000 clients, up from around 6,000.

J.L. Halsey intends to mesh ClickTracks and HotBanana into its existing e-mail services offering, in hopes of offering more complete e-mail marketing packages, said Loren McDonald, chief marketing officer. "Longer term, we see the opportunity to basically build a platform integrating these and other technologies to make life easier for small to middle-marketing departments," he said.

For example, said McDonald, users of the e-mail marketing application Email Labs eventually will be able to log into their accounts and then log into a HotBanana account to create and manage landing pages linked to in e-mail messages.

The deals mark J.L. Halsey's continuing campaign to reinvent itself from NovaCare, a physical rehabilitation services company. NovaCare was a $4 billion publicly traded company before changes to Medicare reimbursement led the company to exit the rehab business.