Optimizely to Acquire Welcome to Help Marketers Drive Customer Experience Outcomes

NEW YORK, NY - December 1, 2021 - Today, leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, Optimizely, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Welcome, a four-time Gartner Leader that brings the best capabilities of content marketing platforms (CMP), marketing resource management (MRM) and digital asset management (DAM) together in a single solution. The combined company will empower marketing teams at brands across the globe to drive real business value through better customer experiences.

In today's digital-first landscape, the internal marketer experience is what ultimately drives the external customer experience. Marketers, in an increasingly hybrid work environment, are responsible for growing the business and responding fast to the ever-changing needs of the increasingly digital consumer. Yet, the complexity and fragmentation of the marketing stack compromises their ability to deliver personalized, contextual experiences and create relevant content at scale.

"We believe a world-class customer experience starts with an outstanding marketer experience,” said Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely. “By combining Welcome’s campaign planning, content production and asset management capabilities with Optimizely’s existing breadth of digital experience solutions, we empower marketers to rapidly launch campaigns and control the optimization of every digital touchpoint which results in growth for the business.”

Welcome’s capabilities combined with Optimizely’s solutions for commerce and content management – as well as its powerful tools for experimentation, personalization and recommendations – means marketers can now:

• Accelerate the end-to-end marketing lifecycle from concept to execution: planning, creating and collaborating on campaigns with the ability to publish the right content to the right audience in minutes.
• Gain unprecedented control and transparency to manage content: controlling delivery of content to the right audience without the support of IT or development, leveraging customer data insights and existing digital assets.
• Grow revenue by scaling adoption of best-in-class optimization: leveraging sophisticated data-driven AI tools such as A/B testing and content recommendations across all marketing processes from content creation to campaign launch – with the ability to then easily share results across the organization.

“As a marketing leader familiar with both platforms, the combination makes perfect sense,” said Kristin Fallon, VP of Global Brand & Digital Marketing of GE Healthcare. “We’ve long dreamed for our own ‘metaverse’ -- a digital collaboration space that enables data-driven content creation and distribution. Integrating experimentation and optimization into content lifecycle management via a single workflow will make us better marketers, creating a real impact on business growth.”​

“We could not be more excited to be joining the Optimizely family,” said Shafqat Islam, CEO and co-founder of Welcome. “We’ve made it our mission to transform the way marketers work, by delivering a purpose-built solution to orchestrate all of marketing. Now, together with Optimizely, we believe we are unifying two category-leading solutions to see that mission through.”

Welcome works with large brands across the globe such as Panasonic, Sodexo and Pure Storage to help transform how they run marketing. Following Optimizely’s acquisition of customer data platform Zaius earlier this year, the addition of Welcome further solidifies Optimizely’s mission to empower digital teams to unlock their digital potential.

Optimizely is a privately held portfolio company of Insight Partners, which acted as the strategic advisor and sponsor of the transaction. Subject to customary closing conditions and attainment of regulatory clearances, the acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of 2021. Until such closing, the companies will continue to operate independently – with Welcome’s core marketing orchestration and asset management capabilities operating standalone. Over time, Welcome will be integrated with Optimizely’s existing stack to create a complete end-to-end portfolio to manage the full content lifecycle. Learn more about how Optimizely’s leading DXP enables digital teams to deliver outsized CX outcomes.

About Welcome

Welcome transforms how marketers run marketing. It is the leading marketing orchestration platform used by the world’s most successful brands to strategically align teams, take the friction out of execution, and demonstrate meaningful results. Only Welcome offers a platform purpose-built for the complexities of modern marketing that can scale to support the largest teams in the world. It is a new layer of the marketing technology stack where marketers can work better together, connect other martech tools, and measure performance. Welcome unleashes the potential of marketing.

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