Digital customer engagement company Urban Airship has acquired Accengage, continental Europe’s largest provider of mobile CRM and push notifications.
Under the deal, Urban Airship and Accengage now form the world’s largest mobile customer engagement company, with rapidly growing solutions for apps, websites, SMS, email, mobile wallets and other channels.
Customers from each company will quickly benefit from access to new technology and expanded engineering resources, as well as support from Europe’s largest team of digital customer engagement experts.
Urban Airship customers include 25% of the Fortune 100 with companies such as Adidas, ASOS, BBC, Caesars Entertainment, Zeit Online, Jet Airways and Vodafone. Accengage adds hundreds more global brands including Air France-KLM, Lidl, Mediaset España, OUI.sncf, Orange, Vente-privee and Zalando. Urban Airship has already delivered over 2.4 trillion messages, and going forward the companies will combine to send more than 90 billion messages per month worldwide.
The businesses share expertise in many of the same high-growth industry verticals — retail, finance, media and travel — and use the same back-end technologies and programming languages, enabling teams to quickly incorporate expertise and technology from one platform to the other. The businesses perfectly complement each other’s regional strengths, with Urban Airship the dominant vendor in the Americas, Nordics and UK, while Accengage leads in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
Globally, customers will benefit from combined technology and process expertise that will accelerate innovation. Urban Airship’s platform brings advanced analytics, predictive machine learning, in-app automation, SMS, mobile wallet, email and intelligent orchestration of messages across channels. Accengage brings expertise in Facebook Messenger support, advanced targeting capabilities, additional marketing cloud integrations and customer support in five languages.
All Accengage employees will join Urban Airship, including CEO and co-founder Patrick Mareuil who will lead European operations as managing director of EMEA from Urban Airship’s new Paris office. Urban Airship will continue to enhance and fully support Accengage’s platform as it rapidly develops a combined platform offering the best of the combined companies’ capabilities.
“More than ever, business growth is dependent on customer experience, and no company creates unique experiences for more brands than Urban Airship,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Urban Airship. “By adding the amazing team from Accengage, we can grow customer value for more businesses around the world while setting new standards for innovation and local support. We’ll use our newly combined expertise and technology to ensure our customers take their digital customer engagement strategies to even greater heights.”
“Accengage and Urban Airship come from a very similar background, we both serve enterprise marketers that want to connect with customers in innovative ways,” said Patrick Mareuil, CEO and co-founder, Accengage. “Urban Airship’s scale and global leadership combined with the strength of our local customer success and technical teams will put the competition far behind as we unlock more value for more businesses around the world.”
“Forrester believes notifications provide a North Star for the evolution of digital experiences. … Across all industries, digital business professionals want to improve customer experience (CX), increase engagement, and improve revenues. Successful notifications deliver on all fronts” (Forrester Research, Inc., Notifications: Build Your Best Practices, September 28, 2018).
