Exacttarget goes to the StockMarket

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by || 11/28/2011

ExactTarget, one of the larger players in email marketing is preparing to bring the company onto the Stock Market. As they have filed their S-1 for an IPO (initial public offering) to raise as much as $100 million. This means that we can have a look into ExactTargets numbers of this and last years. The IPO info didn’t offer any big surprises.

In 2007 the company filed for an earlier IPO of up to $86.25 million. It later withdrew the offering in May 2009 citing “continued weakness and uncertainty in the equity and credit markets”, meaning the financial crisis.

ExactTarget as one of the larger SaaS companies has seen impressive growth for the last 43 consecutive months. The move to the stockmarket is in line with the trend of other email service providers and SaaS suppliers going public.

For the first nine months of 2011, hitting $148 milion in revenue. The net loss was up to $29.3 mn.

There’s a reason for this loss. ‘ExactTarget has been investing. Mainly on innovation, building market share and expanding overseas.’ according to IBJ. ExactTarget has made three acquisitions in the last two years: mPath, cotweet and Keymail marketing. It also added 500 employees and launched their email marketing operations in the UK and Australia.

Some interesting ExactTarget as seen in the ExactTarget IPO

A direct client base of over 4,600 organizations

  • More than 500 reselling marketing service providers
  • 1100 employees
  • $40 million annual R&D investment in 2011
  • Two third-party data centers in Indianapolis and Las Vegas
  • Professional services are available for training, implementation, integration, deliverability, campaign services and strategic consulting
  • 401 employees in sales and marketing

Clients of ExactTarget

Those are some impressive numbers. ExactTarget adds that their revenue is distributed across clients ranging from enterprises to small businesses in numerous industries, including retail and e-commerce, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, financial services and insurance, technology, daily-deal and flash-sale and marketing service providers. Where no client represented more than 5% of revenue.

It’s quite interesting that they named daily deal sites seperately, as those have been seeing huge growth in the last year. Groupon had it’s own IPO as the flagship of the daily deals companies, but recieved some heavy comments as to their (inflated and sustainable) worth.