Constant Contact to expand capabilities through SharpSpring acquisition

E-commerce platform Constant Contact today announced that it had entered a definitive agreement to acquire the CRM and marketing automation platform SharpSpring. The all cash transaction is valued at around $240 million. Both vendors are focused on the SMB market.

Constant Contact provides branded email, website building and social marketing Whether you are a business to business or business to consumer organisation, it’s still a human being (or more than one) who will make a decision about buying from you. Some have referred to this as P2P or people to people selling.. SharpSpring offers end-to-end sales and marketing automation, together with a CRM, to drive revenue growth.

Why we care. “Whether you are a business-to-business or business-to-consumer organization, it’s still a human being (or more than one) who will make a decision about buying from you. Some have referred to this as P2P or people to people selling.” Those words from a Constant Contact blog published last year help us to make sense of this acquisition.

Constant Contact, after all, headlines itself as an e-commerce provider, helping clients to build online stores, upload their products, and promote discovery through social channels and Google Ads. One might think, okay B2C. But one thing recent experiences have underlined is the importance of e-commerce in B2B too, as the buyer’s journey increasingly becomes digital. By acquiring SharpSpring, Constant Contact adds lead gen and CRM capabilities which will appeal to small to medium B2B brands. After all, as the blog says, it’s all P2P in the end.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.