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Silverpop’s new features load customer behaviors from all sources into a central database, match identities to create a unified customer view, and make the resulting information available for real-time, automated interactions across all channels. The central database and cross-channel treatments are two of the three capabilities I’ve defined for a Customer Data Platform. Silverpop falls short on the third CDP function, which is integrated predictive modeling.  But it has partners who fill that gap.

Many CDPs have been quietly maturing for several years.  Silverpop's two-year gestation cycle is a good example.  I can't say precisely why so many are emerging more or less simultaneously, but suspect a combination of business conditions and ever-more-urgent marketer needs.  The long-term drivers are clear: more marketing channels make customer attention harder to attract, spread behavior across different media, and require coordinated contacts across channels. As a result, marketers need a unified customer database, unified campaigns, and way to deliver messages across whatever channels customers use now or in the future. This is what they get from a CDP.

It’s less surprising to see another CDP system than to see it coming from Silverpop.  After all, Silverpop’s twin heritages in B2C email and B2B marketing automation both use simple data models: flat lists for email and basic lead/contact/account tables for B2B marketing automation. Both types of systems traditionally merge customer data using only email address.  Neither build a company's primary marketing database or shares data with external systems. So its quite unexpected to see Silverpop ingest data from any source, cross-reference any set of individual identifiers, offer access to the data, and send messages for delivery by other systems.

SilverpopTM, the only digital marketing technology provider that unifies marketing automation, email, mobile and social, today announced at its Amplify 2013 customer conference, the launch of Universal Behaviors. Now for the first time, marketers will have access to a live stream of real-time behaviors that they can easily understand and instantly integrate into highly relevant individualized campaigns.

“Marketers are being bombarded with a tremendous amount of data about their customers, which often seems like noise,” said Bryan Brown, director of product strategy for Silverpop. “To deliver highly relevant campaigns that convert, marketers have to not only hear everything, but act on what they learn. Now they can extract individual conversations and engage each person in real time. Universal Behaviors removes any remaining barriers to the vision of delivering true one-to-one communications to limitless numbers of customers via behavioral marketing automation.”

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To stay nimble, marketing automation firm Silverpop just secured a fresh $25 million in funding. Escalate Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Ban led this most recent financing round. Showing its ability to adapt, Nussey said Silverpop increased new business by 40% from 2011 to 2012. That amounted to 380 new customers, last year -- one-third of which came to Silverpop for its marketing automation offerings, according to Nussey.

Speaking to Silverpop’s future, a person close to the funding said: “Interestingly, the fund is venture debt, which … is often a bridge to an IPO, acquisition, etc. … Silverpop also opted for venture debt to avoid diluting equity.”