Salesforce acquires Rebel, maker of ‘interactive’ email services, to expand its Marketing Cloud

Published October 5, 2018

Salesforce’s Marketing and Commerce Cloud is the company’s smallest division today, so to help beef it up, the company is making an acquisition to add in more features. Salesforce has acquired Rebel, a startup that develops interactive email services for businesses to enhance their direct marketing services: recipients of interactive emails can write reviews, shop and take other actions without leaving the messages to do so.

In an announcement on Rebel’s site, the startup said it will be joining Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud operation, which will integrate Rebel’s API-based services into its platform.

“With Rebel’s Mail and API solutions, brands, including Dollar Shave Club, L’Oreal and HelloFresh, turn emails into an extension of their website or app – collecting data, removing friction from the conversion process, and enhancing the customer experience. Rebel will enhance the power of Salesforce Marketing Clod and fundamentally change the way people interact with email,” the founders note.

That makes it sound as if the company’s existing business will be wound down as part of the move, although Salesforce and Rebel are not specifically commenting on that yet, and so customers haven’t been informed yet one way or the other.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed in the Rebel announcement. We have contacted both the startup and Salesforce for further comment and to ask about the price. To date, Rebel — co-founded originally as Rebelmail by Joe Teplow and Trever Faden — had raised only about $3 million, with investors including Lerer Hippeau, Sinai Ventures, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others, so if the deal size is equally small, Salesforce likely will not be disclosing it.

Salesforce has made a number of acquisitions to build and expand its marketing services to compete with Adobe and others. Perhaps most notable of these was buying ExactTarget, one of its biggest-ever acquisitions, for $2.5 billion in 2013. (And according to some, it even wanted to buy Adobe at one point.) Competition has been heating up between the two, with Adobe most recently snapping up Marketo for $4.75 billion.

But on the other hand, marketing is currently Saleforce’s smallest division. It pulled in $452 million in revenues last quarter, putting it behind revenues for Sales Cloud ($1 billion), Service Cloud ($892 million) and Salesforce Platform ($712 million). Adding in interactive email functionality isn’t likely to float Marketing and Commerce Cloud to the top of that list, but it does show that Salesforce is trying to improve its products with more functionality for would-be and current customers.

Those customers have a lot of options these days, though, in targeting their own customers with rich email services. Microsoft and Google have both started to add in a lot more features into their own email products, with Outlook and Gmail supporting things like in-email payments and more. There are ways of building such solutions through your current direct marketing providers, or now directly using other avenues.

What will be interesting to see is whether Rebel continues to integrate with the plethora of email service providers it currently works with, or if Salesforce will keep the functionality for itself. Today Rebel’s partners include Oracle, SendGrid, Adobe, IBM, SailThru and, yes, Salesforce.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Rebel launches new tools for developers to build marketing emails

Published June 1, 2018

Until now, Rebel has been known as a platform allowing marketers to incorporate interactive elements into their emails. Today, it’s launching a new version of its API that will allow developers to build entire emails, interactive or not.

Co-founder Joe Teplow explained that the new Rebel Lite API was created in response to developers who were already using the company’s API.

“Our customers loved being able to build these actionable modules in bite-sized chunks with our API,” Teplow said. In fact, they loved it enough that they started asking, “Could we build the entire email with your API?”

So with the Rebel Lite API, Teplow said they can create emails using JSON, “without writing one line of HTML.”

And yes, this is a tool built specifically for developers, not a drag-and-drop email editor for marketers. Teplow said that as the industry has become more complex, “Email as a channel requires a really tight integration between marketers and developers.”

But what’s so hard about sending an email? Kevin Dutra, who leads Rebel’s product team, explained, “The main problem in email market fragmentation on the rendering side.”

In other words, Dutra said it takes extensive testing to make sure your email shows up properly on every device and email client, turning the creation of email into a full-time job. Rebel, on the other hand, is constantly keeping track of changes in email rendering, so if you build an email using the API you can take advantage of all that work to know that your code is up-to-date and that your emails will render properly.

In addition, Rebel has created a number of reusable components to enable the creation of complex layouts.

Teplow added that the new API could also help Rebel reach a new audience — not just large enterprises, but also “regular developers at a smaller company.”

“They weren’t a fit for Rebel before, but we’re slowly starting to let those people in,” he said.