Silverpop’s Amplify 2014: IBM Acquisition Offers International Expansion Opportunities
- Written by Glenn Taylor, Associate Editor
- Published in Industry News
Although Silverpop was acquired by IBM in April, Kevin Bishop, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Marketing Management at IBM, said he does not expect any significant shifts in Silverpop’s overall business strategy. He made the remarks during Amplify 2014, Silverpop’s customer event.
He stressed that under the IBM umbrella, Silverpop will have the ability to extend its reach to customers in more than 170 countries.
"One area where IBM sees great opportunity is to take Silverpop’s superior business model — working with B2B and B2C marketing organizations, working with mid-markets, increasingly working into the enterprise — and expand the reach of the business into more countries by working with IBM’s international capability,” Bishop said. “That’s our first order of a business.”
Silverpop highlighted strong Q1 2014 results and multichannel campaign management features of its Engage platform during the event.
Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop, shared the vendor’s vision to focus following key strategies:Simplifying the path to success; connecting to everything; and automating individual experiences.
Nussey previewed some enhancements to the Engage interface which will complement Silverpop's digital marketing automation capabilities with multichannel campaign management functionality.
Once fully deployed, the capability will include a single place to manage and launch all cross-channel marketing campaigns, with new abilities for workflow, approvals and collaboration. Nussey also unveiled plans for enhanced content creation functionality that will increase efficiency for marketers of all skill levels by creating a frictionless campaign process from creation and review to send and post-send activities.
The new tools will offer easy access to pre-developed templates, support for responsive design, and a streamlined review process, among other updates.
Bryan Brown, VP of Product Strategy, and Seth Lytle, Senior Integration Business Analyst, demonstrated the Engage platform’s integration with content management systems as well as the Contact Insight and Purchase Insights features. The updates are designed to engage customers who generally search a web site’s products but end up making purchases elsewhere.
Using the Finestra app as an example, Brown demonstrated the capabilities of Silverpop Mobile Connector, which is designed to allow developers to build mobile apps using the Silverpop platform.
Silverpop Posts Record Q1 Growth
In Q1 2014, Silverpop achieved its largest year-over-year revenue increase in six years. According to Nussey, the vendor has more than 1,500 customers using behavioral marketing features. More than 5,000 brands and 25,000 marketers use the solution, which averages 50 billion behavioral transactions per year. In 2013, Silverpop added 550 new clients.
“We’ve had more coverage and recognition of our mission and our products by the media community than any time in our history,” Nussey said. “We are meaningfully ahead of almost every single target we set coming into 2014 for Q1.”