Zuora to Acquire Zephr
Yesterday subscription management provider Zuora announced that it plans to acquire Zephr, a provider of a subscription experience platform. The London based Zephr, which focuses on the digital publishing and media industry vertical, already integrates with the Zuora application suite “out of the box” with several joint customers in production. In general the two sets of applications are complimentary with little overlap. The overall subscriber experience is business critical in both new customer acquisition and long term customer retention, so it’s easy to see the opportunity for the combined solution.
Zephr Platform
The Zephr Subscription Experience Platform has five applications:
Intelligent Paywall
Identity and access management
First-party data strategy
User specific personalization
Corporate subscription management
Inside the platform and thus surfaced in several of these applications is a no code rules builder, referred to as “easy-to-use” and also “dynamic” Rules Builder. It empowers non-IT users to customize the experiences without development assistance. In the Intelligent Paywall application, for example, the dynamic Rules Builder enables the user to build, test and launch different conversion strategies targeted to different audience segments. In the User specific personalization application the Rules Builder enables dynamic personalization of the experience based on subscriber data and behavior.
The applications work together to help create, test and optimize packaging with the capability to dynamically personalize the subscriber experience. Providing the capability to deploy multiple types of paywalls, including a version that is dynamic based on subscriber behavior, add a lot of flexibility, which helps increase monetization efforts and enhance experiences. From a data perspective the ability to unify data from disparate data silos enables a deeper level of personalization which can increase conversation with lower acquisition costs, maximize long term subscriber value and increase retention. In subscription businesses account sharing is an issue, and can significantly reduce revenue. In the business to consumer (B2C) markets streaming services like Netflix and Hulu often complain and try to manage account sharing. This same problem exists in business to business (B2B), particularly in larger enterprise accounts. The Corporate subscription management application helps mitigate this issue with scalable federated user access.
For Zuora and Zephr Customers
Zuora, which established itself as the leader in software as a service (SaaS) subscription management, now focuses more broadly on three industry verticals, technology (hardware and software), manufacturing and digital media. Adding the Zephr platform and suite of applications to Zuora’s Central Platform, Zuora CPQ, Zuora Billing, Zuora Revenue and Zuora Collect provides a much more complete solution for digital media providers. Zuora’s applications focus more on managing the account financials and packaging so the addition of the rich set of experience tools is a powerful combination.
While this is complete speculation I’d also expect to see the Zephr toolset adapted to the other two target industry verticals. The behavioral data based dynamic personalization can help companies increase conversion, maximize revenue and increase retention, all key metrics for the health of a subscription business. The current Zuora suite enables multiple packaging options and even testing, but the addition of personalized dynamic packaging and paywalls adds a great deal of flexibility to the overall solution.
The combination of the two platforms and solutions provides the capability to manage the entire subscription lifecycle while optimizing the subscriber experience. While the solutions are already integrated, it is likely that the integration between the two will deepen post-acquisition. For current customers of both companies the integrated solution set provides a much more robust toolset for growing a subscription business with the best possible subscriber experience. Once the acquisition closes Zuora will have one of if not the most complete subscription management platform offerings in the marketplace.
