In a bid to supercharge its marketing and commerce cloud, Salesforce has decided to acquire interactive e-mail service provider Rebel. The acquisition will let Salesforce improve it’s e-mail offering for its customers. Basically, Rebel’s addition will let enterprises add an element of interactivity to their e-mails. Folks receiving the e-mail will be able to perform actions such as writing reviews, making purchases, and perform a slew of other actions from within the mail.
Rebel’s API-based services meanwhile, will be integrated into Salesforce’s Marketing cloud operation platform. Both of the companies have however, refrained from putting a number to the deal, and as such, we don’t currently know what kind of money changed hands.
We do however know that Rabel had so far raised around $3 million, from a slew of investors that included Sinai Ventures, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk etc. Going by that number, we can expect that the deal to be of the order of a few million dollars — also because, Salesforce wouldn’t have invested a whole lot of money for buying a product that it could have also developed in-house for a similar sum.
Commenting on the acquisition, Rebel founders said:
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 Clod and fundamentally change the way people interact with email.
Interestingly, Salesforce was part of Rebel’s client list well before the acquisition. The company’s client list also included other bigwigs such as Oracle, SendGrid, Adobe, IBM, and SailThru. It will be interesting to see whether Rebel keeps its old clients (many of which are Salesforce competitors), or if it lets them go. The former is more likely if Rebel is run as a standalone unit, and the latter is more probable if Salesforce decides to assimilate it.
Meanwhile, the deal is expected to help Salesforce improve the prospects of its marketing cloud division. The division raked in around $452 million in revenues in the last quarter. This put it behind Sales Cloud ($1 billion), Service Cloud ($892 million) and the proprietary Salesforce platform ($712 million).
