Campaign Monitor buys customer data platform Tagga

A screen from the Campaign Monitor website, showing post-acquisition unified customer profiles

Campaign Monitor is taking a step toward becoming more than an email automation provider, with its announcement today that it has purchased customer data platform (CDP) Tagga.

The San Francisco-based Campaign Monitor has its own extensive set of profiles, built from users who have opted in with their email addresses.

Those profiles largely consist of behavioral data from user activity on apps or websites, such as whether the person with email address [email protected] has visited a page showing red sneakers. A marketer could then send a follow-up email featuring a discount on those red sneakers.

“The more personalized the message,” Campaign Monitor CEO Alex Bard told me, “the higher the engagement rate,” adding that “email is still the thoroughbred of engagement.”

But, he noted, Campaign Monitor’s profiles are “not as rich or as powerful as a CDP.”

A customer data platform like the Vancouver-based Tagga is intended as the single location for all customer-related info, combining data from any structured or unstructured source. Typically, a CDP contains a much richer set of data about users than what is available from an email automation platform.

Bard said that the integration of the two sets of profiles will be connected largely through common email addresses, for which all users have opted in.

Some of those combined profiles may be identified, with actual names of the users, while others may have only the email address as identifier. All customer profiles are siloed to the particular brand where the user signed up.

The larger intention, Bard said, is for his company to evolve into a marketing platform that is oriented toward one-to-one marketing, moving beyond email into SMS text or messaging apps, but still keeping the interface simple.

Terms of the acquisition were not made public.