Cheetah Digital Announces Major CM Group Merger

CM Group, a portfolio of martech companies focused on multichannel digital marketing, today announced its merger with Cheetah Digital under the CM Group name.

The merger expands and enhances both CM Group’s and Cheetah Digital’s ability to deliver innovative email, omnichannel, personalization, and loyalty solutions.

The combined company will own a broad array of technologies referenced in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, which orchestrate marketer communications with client segments across multiple channels.

Following the merger, the company plans significant investments across the portfolio to bring new products to its base of 70,000+ active customers.

As marketers increasingly seek multi- and omnichannel technology solutions to meet modern customer expectations, CM Group will expand its primary focus from email marketing to overall customer engagement and give marketers the ability to acquire, engage, and retain customers through the channels that matter most.

Cheetah Digital’s Customer Engagement Suite solutions including Experiences, Personalization, Loyalty, and the Engagement Data Platform will help further accelerate the pace of innovation across CM Group’s existing products, enabling customer organizations of all sizes to meet the needs of modern consumers.

What differentiates CM Group is that each of its nine products focuses on specific verticals or market segments. The merger with Cheetah Digital will expand CM Group’s reach into the large enterprise segment. Key Cheetah Digital customers include Hilton, Neiman Marcus, Walgreens and Williams-Sonoma.

CM Group’s model enables product development and services to be tuned to the specific needs of each of its key customer verticals and segments, making CM Group’s products core to the marketing tech stack. By leveraging Cheetah Digital’s innovative solutions, CM Group’s brands will be able to deliver new vertical and use-case specific products to markets ranging from small and medium businesses to enterprises across key verticals including retail, ecommerce, media, publishing, financial services, travel and hospitality, entertainment, agencies, and more.

“Our merger with Cheetah Digital means CM Group will be well positioned to meet the needs of customers of all sizes and shapes, and we will continue to be their marketing technology partner as they grow by delivering the right technology at the right time, tailored to their industry and built for the scale at which they operate,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO at CM Group.

“By keeping each CM Group product distinct and focused on specific verticals or market segments, we deliver superior solutions, expertise, and outcomes for customers when compared to the large volume of generalist solutions in the market today.”

“CM Group’s ‘home for every marketer’ model is a completely unique approach in our industry and in broader martech. This merger offers us the opportunity to bring immense innovation to the customers within the CM Group portfolio through an expanded suite of product offerings. The momentum of our ‘innovation engine’ at Cheetah will develop these solutions beyond email to bring net-new value for our customers,” said Peter McCormick, executive chairman at Cheetah Digital.

CM Group will continue to look for opportunities to accelerate innovation, augment existing product capabilities and add complementary technologies through future business combinations, bringing significant benefits to marketers and further accelerating CM Group’s organic growth.

“As marketers’ needs have evolved and organizations turn toward their own data as the foundation of their marketing strategy, CM Group is perfectly positioned to grow dramatically in the future. Their unique approach – having a suite of highly specialized data-driven offerings – creates an opportunity to become the leading provider of modern marketing technology to nearly every organization in the world,” said Adam Berger, managing director at Insight Partners.

“With these two organizations joining forces, CM Group is set to become a global leader in customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and growth,” said Sandy Gill, managing director at Vector Capital.

“Marketers are looking for the next generation of technology to be specialized to their needs and CM Group is executing on a strategy that truly meets the needs of their customers while opening up new opportunities to accelerate growth within a fragmented martech landscape.”

In relation to the merger’s implications in the APAC region, Billy Loizou (pictured) vice president, Go-To-Market APAC at Cheetah Digital said:

“This is an exciting next chapter in the evolution of Cheetah Digital, with the potential to expand and mature many areas of the business. Within our portfolio, we can now offer a plethora of marketing solutions for all business sizes, with Cheetah Digital still remaining as a distinct product offering and Customer Loyalty remaining at the heart and forefront of our offering in the APAC region.This merger now places Cheetah Digital as a home for all marketers and allows us to scale with any businesses on their digital transformation journey.”

The existing owners of CM Group, including Insight Partners, will remain majority owners of the combined company. Vector Capital, which was previously a majority owner of Cheetah Digital, will become a substantial minority owner of the combined company.