• by Ray Schultz , May 12, 2020

An integration designed to help brands send data-driven emails has been formed by SparkPost, an email delivery engine, and ActionIQ, a customer data platform.

The combined service will help brands provide contextual email experiences at scale, and at a lower total cost of ownership, the companies claim.

The news comes as the COVID-19 crisis is “accelerating the digital transformation and forcing brick-and-mortar retailers to think more about ecom,” says Justin DeBrabant, VP product at ActionIQ.

For its part, ActionIQ can unify all of a brand’s data to drive personalization across email and other channels, returning data in real-time, it says. 

”Email is a really rich data source, and that data should be used in other channels as well,” DeBrabant says.

In addition to sending six trillion messages per year, SparkPost helps clients “treat their email list well,” with analytics that show “who’s engaging and not engaging.” says Hal Muchnick, chief commercial officer at SparkPost.

The new service is available to joint clients. It was “proven out in the field with a handful of joint customers before we formalized it.”

Many of ActionIQ’s clients are “moving to a hub-and-spoke marketing stack, where data, intelligence, and orchestration lives within a centralized CDP hub, and the spokes are the delivery systems,” DeBrabant adds.

Started six years ago, ActionIQ now has 100 employees.

SparkPost has $70 million in annual recurring revenue, and has 220 employees.