The SaaS software giant Salesforce has acquired an interactive email services startup Rebel. The acquisition of Rebel highlights how Salesforce is trying to provide new ways for marketers to deliver personalized and interactive emails to consumers. The company announced on its website (link):
We are excited to join Salesforce and accelerate our mission of reimagining the inbox by enabling marketers and developers to create beautiful, seamless, interactive email experiences.
With Rebel’s Mail and API solutions, brands, including Dollar Shave Club, L’Oreal and HelloFresh, turn emails into an extension of their website or app – collecting data, removing friction from the conversion process, and enhancing the customer experience. Rebel will enhance the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and fundamentally change the way people interact with email.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to techcrunch, “To date, Rebel — co-founded originally as Rebelmail by Joe Teplow and Trever Faden — had raised only about $3 million, with investors including Lerer Hippeau, Sinai Ventures, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others, so if the deal size is equally small, Salesforce likely will not be disclosing it.”
Salesforce has made a number of acquisitions to build and expand its marketing services to compete with Adobe and others. Perhaps most notable of these was buying ExactTarget, one of its biggest-ever acquisitions, for $2.5 billion in 2013. (And according to some, it even wanted to buy Adobe at one point.) Competition has been heating up between the two, with Adobe most recently snapping up Marketo for $4.75 billion.