PLEASANT RIDGE – ePrize has announced its second acquisition in six months, buying Cellit, a Chicago-based mobile marketing agency. The deal adds 16 employees to ePrize, which will top 400 employees in 2012 forcing the digital marketing company to look for new headquarters.
Cellit?s expertise in mobile marketing and customer relationship management products and services include short message services, mobile-optimized sites and mobile applications, which ePrize said is important in an era of growing marketing over mobile devices.
In July 2011, ePrize acquiring the customer relationship management division of Apollo Data Technologies.
?Rapid consumer adoption of mobile technology is fundamentally changing how brands engage and inform the public about new products and services,? said Matt Wise, ePrize CEO. ?MMA Global reported that 83 percent of mobile users take their phones with them everywhere, and CTIA reports that 74 million people in the U.S. have opted in to text messages from marketers. Brands with a mobile component in their campaign have a huge opportunity to capture consumers wherever they are and whenever they?re ready.?
In 2012, ePrize expects mobile revenue to triple as a result of the Cellit acquisition. Administering four-times more national promotions than any other company, ePrize forecasts that 80 percent of campaigns will incorporate a mobile component developed by ePrize by the end of 2012, growing from 20 percent in 2011.
Through the acquisition, Cellit now is a division of ePrize named ?Cellit: ePrize Mobile Solutions.? David Wachs, founder and president of Cellit, has joined the ePrize executive team as senior vice president of Mobile, and general manager of Cellit. Cellit will remain in Chicago, with plans to combine office space with ePrize?s Chicago team in the near future.
?Major brands understand the value in engaging the consumer via their mobile device,? Wachs said. ?They have moved beyond testing mobile programs in silos and are now implementing robust, multi-channel marketing solutions. Together ePrize and Cellit can bring holistic, multi-channel capabilities to market that drive customer engagement and loyalty, while creating a single customer profile for the brand. Cellit client case studies show that mobile offers drive 15-to-20 times the response rate of typical coupons and eight times the response rate of email.?
Cellit will enhance the current ePrize promotion, loyalty and re-contact offerings; enable ongoing customer relationship management via text-messaging platforms; and allow promotions and loyalty programs to integrate with in-store marketing efforts and point-of-sale systems.
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