Vocus Acquires iContact for E-Mail Marketing Expertise

Marketing and PR SaaS provider Vocus, a member of our Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index, has announced the acquisition of e-mail marketing solution vendor iContact for $169 million in cash and shares.

The synergy between the two companies is unmistakable: Vocus provides a suite of marketing tools and iContact provides a marketing tool. Vocus already offers search marketing, social marketing and publicity modules built on a recommendation engine, and the iContact purchase will add the ability to mass-send marketing e-mails.

A major part of iContact’s value proposition, according to the press release, is that it’s both SMB-focused and integrated with Facebook and Twitter. Customers can track clicks, links, Facebook likes, Twitter retweets and so forth from a centralized dashboard that also manages the entire marketing campaign.

“Thanks to the hard work of many dedicated people, iContact has emerged as a leader in e-mail and social marketing software, with over 70,000 customers and 1 million users,”  iContact Co-founder and CEO Ryan Allis said in a prepared statement.

According to the press release, iContact customers should expect to stay the course when the acquisition finalizes later this year, with the ability to either upgrade to the full Vocus suite or keep using what they have as a standalone product. And all of iContact’s staff and operations will remain in place in Raleigh, N.C.

Vocus hasn’t been the strongest performer on the Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index (despite being the weekly winner at least once in 2012 thus far). But apparently, it’s doing well enough for itself that it can drop millions on expanding its suite. And that speaks well for the health of the cloud market as a whole. Stay tuned to see how this purchase affects Vocus’ standings in the index.