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Intuit Acquires Mailchimp for $12 Billion, D4t4 Updates Celebrus CDP & More CX News

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Intuit acquired Mailchimp for $12 billion in a big boost for email marketing software, leading our news roundup in CX for the week.

Intuit, a technology platform that makes TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint and Credit Karma, has announced that it has agreed to acquire Mailchimp for $12 billion. Mailchimp provides a customer engagement and marketing software platform.

According to reports, this the largest acquisition of a private bootstrapped company and one of the largest acquisitions of a SaaS company to date. Further, Mailchimp appears to cash out in the largest acquisition of a standalone marketing software provider. Of course, analysts will have varying definitions of standalone marketing software provider. 

Either way, company officials said the acquisition will allow Intuit to continue to build out a customer growth platform for small and mid-market businesses, allowing them to manage customer relationships. Users will be able to combine their customer data from Mailchimp and QuickBooks’ purchase data to get actionable insights. 

Mailchimp, founded in Atlanta in 2001 and now with 1,200-plus employees, began by offering email marketing solutions and evolved into a customer engagement and marketing automation provider fueled by an AI-driven technology stack. 

The transaction is expected to close prior to the end of Intuit’s second quarter fiscal 2022, subject to receipt of required regulatory approvals and satisfaction or waiver of other customary closing conditions.

In other customer experience and digital marketing software news...

Persona Closes $150 Million Round

Persona, an identity infrastructure company built to manage customer identities, announced that it has closed a $150 million Series C funding round. This comes less than six months after its $50 million Series B round. This latest round is led by Founders Fund, with participation from Meritech Capital Partners, BOND, and existing investors Index Ventures and Coatue Management. The new capital brings the company's total amount raised to $217.5 million, with a valuation of $1.5 billion. 

Persona's identity infrastructure is designed to help businesses collect, verify and manage individual's identities, and offers automation and orchestration tools. The new financing will help drive the next phase in Persona's growth, as the company expands its team, extends the offering within its identity infrastructure and "furthers its vision of a ubiquitous identity layer that makes the internet safer, more trusted, and more accessible," according to a press release on the funding round.

Dialpad Acquires Kare Knowledgeware

Dialpad, an AI-powered communication and collaboration provider, has announced its acquisition of Kare Knowledgeware, a customer experience platform that optimizes workflow orchestration, knowledge management analytics and business intelligence. The acquisition and integration of Kare Knowledgeware into Dialpad Contact Center will broaden the application of AI and natural language processing (NLP) throughout the Dialpad platform to enable conversational AI, according to company officials. 

Learning Opportunities

Kare Knowledgeware organizes unstructured data and automating responses to common customer inquiries, analyzing insight from traffic. The application of Kare Knowledgeware technology is designed to resolve inbound support traffic handled by Kare. 

Commercetools Secures $140m Series C Funding Round

Commercetools, which provides headless commerce movement, has announced a $140 million investment completing its Series C funding round. Led by global tech investor Accel, alongside existing investors Insight Partners and REWE Group, the capital raised will fuel the company’s global expansion. The company does ecommerce that is API first. Commercetools plans to use the capital increase to expand sales and marketing efforts in North America, Europe and APAC.

Zoom Plans Video Engagement Center Launch

Zoom will launch its Zoom Video Engagement Center (VEC), a cloud-based solution that enables experts and end customers to connect over video, in early 2022. These video-optimized interactions will enable users to:
  • Engage with customers
  • Bring in experts for additional support or troubleshooting
  • Offer digital experiences to customers from physical locations like a brick-and-mortar store or digital experiences like a website or application.

D4t4 Solutions Adds Automated Marketing Signals Celebrus CDP

D4t4 Solutions, a provider of customer data, management and analytics, has added nearly 100 new preconfigured Automated Marketing Signals (AMS) to the Celebrus Customer Data Platform (CDP). AMS, powered by machine learning and AI, automates the detection of customer behaviors, such as visiting a particular web page or showing evidence of a recent life event like getting married or buying a home. It enables personalization of content based on an individual's profile — and the Celebrus CDP can persist profiles to provide insights for anonymous users.

AnalyticsIQ Announces Data Integration Partnership With Snowflake

AnalyticsIQ, a provider of predictive marketing data, has announced an expanded relationship with Snowflake, a data cloud company. AnalyticsIQ will now make its B2C and B2B data available through the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Through this integration, users get access to thousands of AnalyticsIQ’s predictive data points. Snowflake users can access first-party audience enrichment, custom analytics, predictive modeling, digital targeting and measurement.

Grammarly Introduces Grammarly for Developers

Grammarly has announced the launch of Grammarly for Developers. With Grammarly’s Text Editor SDK (software development kit), the first offering through Grammarly for Developers, builders get access to tools that support writing assistance in web applications. Developers have already been invited to apply for the Text Editor SDK in closed beta. Previously, developers had to develop their own technologies, like exploring natural language processing models using machine learning

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Adds Organic Articles for Pages

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has added a new feature: organic Articles for Pages.

Organizations have been limited to character counts for organic posts in the feed. Articles for Pages, however, allows users to:

  • Engage members with professional content they can consume without leaving the platform.
  • Produce and share content, exploring key topics at length with rich media, links, pull quotes and more.
  • Spark conversations with your community in the comments section.
  • Encourage next-step actions, like following your Page, clicking through to your website, or downloading a resource.
  • Access audience insights to learn about the firmographics of people reading and interacting with the content.

LinkedIn also updated its “Scheduled LinkedIn Live” and “LinkedIn Events” products.

Emplifi Releases Social Commerce Cloud

Emplifi, a customer experience platform, has announced the launch of Emplifi Social Commerce Cloud. The launch synchronizes social commerce activities across platforms, providing automated and live assistance during the shopping experience. It also gives brands a single, holistic view of their social commerce efforts, along with advanced analytics. 

Crownpeak Launches Experience Optimization Engine

Crownpeak, a digital experience platform, has announced the launch of the Crownpeak Experience Optimization Engine, powered by Dynamic Yield. With this solution, companies can create, optimize and deliver individualized digital experiences across channels. The solution comes as part of a strategic partnership with Dynamic Yield, a personalization platform acquired by McDonald's.

The Crownpeak Experience Optimization Engine integrates Dynamic Yield's technology into Crownpeak's digital experience platform (DXP) and hybrid headless CMS. It includes:

  • AI-powered content recommendations that evolve as individuals' preferences do, for real-time, one-to-one relevance.
  • Advanced segmentation and analytics.
  • Personalization in the layout, menu bars, display ads, pop-ups, calls-to-action (CTAs), text and more.
  • Cross-channel experiences
  • Unified profiles, based on a single view of each customer or prospect.
  • Automated testing and optimization
  • Cross-functional application

About the Author

Dom Nicastro

Dom Nicastro is managing editor of CMSWire and an award-winning journalist with a passion for technology, customer experience and marketing. With more than 20 years of experience, he has written for various publications, like the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Magazine. He has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, informative, and engaging content to his readers. Dom works tirelessly to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry to provide readers with accurate, trustworthy information to help them make informed decisions. Connect with Dom Nicastro: