Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Constant Contact Acquires Social-Media CRM Provider Bantam Live

February 22, 2011

Constant Contact, an online marketing company for small- and midsize businesses, announced the acquisition of social-media Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company Bantam Live for $15 million.


The acquisition is part of Constant Contact’s strategies to expand its multi-channel marketing capabilities. The all-cash deal will offer Constant Contact with a customer relationship management process that compiles data from social media interactions, clicks, e-mail opens, survey responses and event participation.

Through acquisitions over the past year, Constant Contact has added social media monitoring, a survey tool, API integration with sales lead applications and a feature for promoting and managing live events.

Bantam Live’s technology offers a communication and social CRM product to Constant Contact’s more than 400,000 small business customers, helping them better track, measure and increase customer engagement, according to company officials.

With Constant Contact, small organizations have access to industry information and education to help them learn e-mail marketing and online survey best practices.

Organizations can benefit from Constant Contact's high e-mail deliverability rates due to strong partnerships with ISPs.

Constant Contact's e-mail marketing, online survey and event marketing tools help businesses create professional-looking e-mail newsletters and insightful online surveys and begin a dialogue with their customers. More than 400,000 customers worldwide use Constant Contact.

Bantam Live, which has raised $1.7 million in funding, provides an online workspace for business teams that have social CRM features. Its social CRM features include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application.

In May 2010, Constant Contact acquired NutshellMail, a Facebook funded startup that offers Web-based services through various social networking outlets. NutshellMail allows users to send and receive messages from Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter to their e-mail inbox.


Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee



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