Salesforce Acquires Rebel in Play to Improve Email Marketing

Source: Salesforce

CRM software company Salesforce recently announced its acquisition of email marketing firm Rebel. This is being seen across the industry as a major play to bolster their comparatively lackluster Marketing Cloud. The merger will integrate Rebel’s existing email functionality into Salesforce’s software.

The merger, announced in a post on Rebel’s website, states that Salesforce will be integrating the startup’s API-service into it’s own offerings. Rebel currently offers enhancements to emails, allowing brands to create messages that enable recipients to write reviews, shop and more. These features turn baseline emails into extensions of the company website. In a statement on Rebel’s website, the startup said “Rebel will enhance the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and fundamentally change the way people interact with email.”

There has been no time frame given as to when the companies will join, and neither party has made any public statement regarding the future of current Rebel clients. It is unclear if Rebel’s product will continue to exist as an independent product or if current customers will have to move over to Salesforce to continue using the Rebel technology.

This news comes soon after Adobe’s purchase of Marketo, pushing Adobe into direct competition with Salesforce in the marketing space. As a result, many are seeing this move as a play by the company to bolster its email marketing capabilities to compete with this new rival. The company has made similar purchases in the past, including the 2013 purchase of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. The exact figure behind this deal has not yet been made public and it remains unclear if that will change.

Salesforce currently offers a B2B automated marketing solution called Pardot. It directly integrates with their CRM to harness all available data. This helps align marketing and sales to generate leads and keep them engaged.

Rebel, formerly known as Rebelmail, was established just two years ago by co-founders Joe Teplow and Trever Faden.