$2.5Bn for email marketing!
I’m pretty sure users of Salesforce.com will be smiling after the acquisition of ExactTarget: perhaps finally Salesforce will have a good email marketing system! it’s an obvious move to address an area of weakness in the Salesforce offering, and with the current Salesforce strategy of “let’s not worry about the money we’re losing whilst we grow the company”, the huge amounts of money involved probably isn’t worrying Salesforce.
In addition to the email marketing capabilities of ExactTarget, Salesforce is also acquiring Pardot, a marketing automation company that was acquired about nine months ago by ExactTarget. Perhaps this is the most interesting element of the deal for marketers: until now, marketing automation and CRM have typically been separated, with often clunky interfaces between them. If Salesforce can integrate marketing automation technology with its CRM, it might be possible to get closer to measuring the ROI of marketing activities right through to the final sale.