Zeta Interactive Corp., a data-driven marketing firm that started life in the student loans business and then pivoted during the recession, is growing its footprint to 1,300 employees in 25 offices with the acquisition of Acxiom Ltd.’s Acxiom Impact email services unit. The value of the deal wasn’t revealed, but TechCrunch quoted unnamed sources saying it was just over $50 million.

The deal comes less than a year after Zeta acquired eBay Inc.’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Zeta CEO and Co-founder David A. Steinberg said the company aims to become the dominant player in management services for marketing automation. The addition of an email component will help the company along that journey.

The enterprise marketing market has been turned upside down by data, spawning dozens of startups seeking to apply big data technologies to make customer interactions more personal and focused. Zeta maintains a database of more than 350 million people and works with a network of information providers to create customer profiles that marketers can use for targeting and CRM.

Personalization is the most preferred method for improving email interaction, according to recent Experian Data Quality research. It achieves the greatest bang for the buck with the least efforts, according to a recent study by Ascend2 Partners LLC (see chart above). The new mantra of enterprise marketing was summed up by Zeta CIO Jeffry Nimeroff in a recent interview with SiliconANGLE: “Even though I’m selling into a business, I’m dealing with an individual.”

Zeta has had a long time partnership with Acxiom, and under the terms of the acquisition that will grow even closer. The companies will collaborate to minimize the impact of the transition for current Acxiom Impact clients. The email platform will operate independently for now, but the company plans to merge it with its other properties into a single marketing automation platform.

The combination of eBay’s CRM platform, Zeta’s database and Acxiom’s email service should make it a potent competitor in a consolidating market that has seen a lot of jockeying for position recently. Oracle acquired Responsys Inc. in late 2013 following Salesforce.com Inc.’s acquisition of ExactTarget Inc. Marketing automation thought leader Marketo Inc. recently sold out to a private equity firm, a move probably driven by increasing consolidation in the hands of large companies. Marketo’s principal competitor, Eloqua Inc., sold out to Oracle in late 2012.

Zeta was founded by Steinberg and former Apple and PepsiCo, Inc. CEO John Sculley.

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