Umbraco HQ announces acquisition of uMarketingSuite
Umbraco remains one of our favourite Content Management Systems (CMSs) to work with and over the past two or three years it has continued to go from strength to strength. The latest announcement from Umbraco is the acquisition of uMarketingSuite, an already well-established product that adds a range of capabilities to the Umbraco platform around personalisation, optimisation and analytics.
Here at 3Chillies we are already resellers of uMarketingSuite and know first-hand the value it can bring to Umbraco by significantly expanding the features and functionality available to digital marketing teams.
In this post we’re going to explore the acquisition, what it means for Umbraco, and why we think this is a good move that makes sense.
What is uMarketingSuite?
uMarketingSuite is a popular product that acts as an add-on to Umbraco, bringing in a number of additional capabilities that are not available natively within the main Umbraco offering. It is positioned as a “all-in-one marketing suite for Umbraco” and includes four main features:
A/B testing
The ability to quickly and easily set up A/B testing in order to continue to optimise a website, taking a data-driven approach.
Personalisation
The ability to personalise experience and targets to different audiences either based on specific personas or those at different customer journey stages. Personalisation includes access to metrics to understand what’s working and what doesn’t, with useful features such as a split-view feature to help manage content aimed at different audiences.
360-degree profiling
Profiling both identified and unknown contacts relating to your visitors, leads and other contacts, incorporating both information from your CRM system, customer data platform (CDP) or actions on your website. The profiling helps track granular activity of the behaviour of your site visitors, helping teams to make improvements to customer journeys and drive better experiences.
Analytics
Server-side analytics that use secure first-party cookies to be “privacy friendly” and deliver metrics around visitor behaviour such as scroll depth, time spent on page, clicks linked and more. The reporting also supports the other features of the suite including personalisation and A/B testing.
Why has Umbraco acquired uMarketingSuite?
The acquisition brings some key missing features into the Umbraco platform, helping it to go beyond being a CMS and become more like a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with a wider range of features. This will make Umbraco more attractive, particularly to larger organisations with more complex needs, and also potentially bring features such as A/B Testing and Personalisation to a wider group of Umbraco users.
The acquisition of uMarketingSuite follows a recent trend of Umbraco HQ acquiring well-established apps that have been developed by partners or community members, with the people behind the app also joining Umbraco HQ as members of staff. These apps are then added to the Umbraco suite of products and marketed as “add-ons” that help to extend the functionality and feature set of the platform.
For example, in April 2023 Umbraco acquired Outfield Digital (led by Matt Brailsford) resulting in the launch of two new add-ons:
- Umbraco UI Builder, a tool that helps developers manage data sources they want to bring into Umbraco, previously known as the Konstrukt product.
- Umbraco Commerce, an e-commerce solution for Umbraco previously known as the Vendr product.
Similarly, the Umbraco Workflow add-on that enables more complex content workflows and approvals within Umbraco, was based on the acquisition of the Umbraco “Plumber” app.
Does the acquisition make sense?
In our view the acquisition makes a lot of sense and in some ways isn’t a huge surprise. In fact, if you’d asked us what the next logical or most likely acquisition for Umbraco HQ was going to be, we’d have probably said uMarketingSuite.
UMarketingSuite is already a popular and trusted application across the professional Umbraco community that fits seamlessly with Umbraco’s back office. It’s already tried and tested, so we think it’s a relatively low-risk investment for Umbraco HQ.
It also includes in-demand features that marketing teams are looking for and are often native to some of Umbarco’s competitors. UMarketingSuite also has particular strengths around transparency of the data that is collected.
The uMarketingSuite product team are also now joining Umbraco HQ as staff, and could also start to develop additional functionality too.
In the recent Codegarden conference, personalisation was also mentioned as one of four strategic “lighthouses of the future” that will guide the Umbraco product roadmap. The reference to personalisation at Codegarden may have been made in reference to the acquisition, but also might hint at further evolution of uMarketingSuite’s personalisation capabilities.
What will happen next?
In terms of immediate change, the answer is not much. Umbraco’s news release confirms that the product will remain available as it has been before. For clients who have acquired uMarketingSuite through 3Chillies, it will just be business-as-usual for the time being. Meanwhile behind the scenes Umbraco will work to integrate uMarketingSuite and the product team to ensure a seamless transition.
While the news release mentions that “we will reveal how the add-on fits into our product roadmap later this year”, we expect it will eventually be rebranded like the other Umbraco add-ons, possibly called Umbraco Marketing Suite. We also expect there could be some kind of eventual evolution of the features, with the release talking about future “possibilities”.
At the moment, we think this will likely remain a paid-for addition to the main platform, still providing good value for money.
Need more information on the acquisition? Get in touch!
Overall, we think the uMarketingSuite is a canny move from Umbraco HQ that expands the platform with some pretty important features integral to customer experience. It will help Umbraco to compete with other CMSs and DXPs, but also represents a relatively low-risk.
If you’d like to discuss the acquisition or using uMarketingSuite, then get in touch!
