Vocus Buys Email Marketing Company iContact For $169 Million

Big M&A news in the email marketing world. Vocus, the publicly-listed provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, has acquired iContact, a company that provides email marketing services for small and medium sized businesses. The total acquisition price is $169 million.

iContact’s email marketing software automates the process of creating, sending and tracking email communications for businesses. iContact, which has raised over $50 million to date, also allows users to track email campaign effectiveness, accessing data around opens, clicks and more.

iContact is also integrated with Facebook and Twitter, and allows users to launch campaigns and offers to reach new customers, create word-of-mouth buzz and generate sales. The platform also serves as a monitoring application to track opens, clicks, likes, follows, and more. The platform is currently being used 70,000 organizations.

For Vocus, email will become the latest addition to the company’s marketing suite. Vocus’ suite already includes search marketing, social marketing (via the acquisition of Facebook apps maker North Social) and publicity applications, centered around a recommendation engine.