Today, I am proud to share the news that Sitecore has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Moosend, an innovative marketing automation and campaign management platform that is relied on by a diverse set of customers including Domino’s, Interpublic Group and Sephora. The acquisition, which is part of Sitecore’s ambitious ongoing $1.2 billion growth plan, is expected to close by the end of May of 2021.

Moosend perfectly complements Sitecore’s industry-leading core offering to create a personalization powerhouse for modern enterprises. Moosend’s state-of-the-art marketing automation and AI-powered customer engagement features will streamline Sitecore’s ability to engage, nurture, and convert customer relationships to deliver personalized experiences across every channel. The combined offering will make it easier for marketers to deploy and measure campaigns and automate workflows across the entire customer journey — a game-changer for the majority of brands not yet set up for life cycle marketing.

While this is an exciting development for Sitecore and its customers, it’s worth acknowledging that broader trends around privacy — from new regulations globally to Apple’s tightened app settings and internet browsers eliminating third-party cookies — seem to disfavor data-driven personalization. It’s a paradox of modern times: consumers expect brands to cater to them as unique individuals, providing a consistent experience everywhere and rewarding loyalty in deeper ways; at the same time, they want privacy first — more control over data, less confusion on how it’s used and an end to creepy targeting and algorithmically-garbled messaging that only a bot would love.

At Sitecore, we believe that this environment is actually an opportunity for enterprise customers to make once-in-a-generation leaps forward in terms of human connection, customer acquisition and brand loyalty. That’s why Sitecore is building the industry’s first fully integrated, end-to-end SaaS-based digital experience platform — to facilitate both the modern art and science of earning customer relationships through experience to make consenting to data-sharing an afterthought.

Recent additions are uniquely suited to help Sitecore in that task. Boxever’s customer data platform, which has long been architected for first-party customer acquisition and engagement, makes it seamless for brands to identify people in a cookieless world; Moosend’s cloud-native, API-first platform helps teams move faster to capitalize on that data in sophisticated ways; and Sitecore ensures a great experience across every touchpoint — from beautiful content to best-in-class commerce via Four51.

Altogether, Sitecore is creating an exciting future for experience-minded brands to thrive in the coming decades.