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[Magilla Marketing] E-mail service provider Silverpop announced yesterday it has acquired marketing automation and lead-management company Vtrenz [pronounced vee-trends] for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 1999, Vtrenz' iMarketing Automation software helps marketers with long sales cycles create, manage and analyze integrated campaigns. The software allows marketers to segment their databases based on prospects' preferences and behavior. It also offers automatic lead scoring to help determine, among other things, who is ready to buy.

For example, it may determine that people who downloaded a white paper, took a certain survey and attended a Webinar tend to convert at a much higher rate than others in the prospect pool, and score them accordingly.

It also offers a content-creation and editing tool that allows marketers to create personalized surveys and marketing collateral for distribution in e-mail, direct mail and on Web sites, and automatically measures, tracks and analyzes recipient responses.

"The Vtrenz tool brings all the channels -- print, e-mail and the others -- an incredible degree of campaign automation," said Silverpop's CEO Bill Nussey. "It does landing pages, and forms and surveys, and it brings it all into one tool and makes that tool a seamless part of Salesforce.com or MS CRM."

According to the company, its solution integrates easily with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

"When the sales person goes into Salesforce.com, instead of seeing a bunch of undifferentiated leads, they see this rich information about all of the things these people have done and a score that explains which of the leads are likely to be more interested," said Nussey.

Vtrenz will remain headquartered in Fargo, ND. It has about 35 employees and there will be no layoffs, according to Nussey.

"We're going to combine back-office functions, but both our companies are growing at a very fast clip. One of the benefits [of the acquisition] is we get a bunch of good accounting folks faster than we could hire them," he said.