Constant Contact Snaps Up SinglePlatform for $65 Million

Constant Contact announced this morning that it has snapped up SinglePlatform, a service that allows businesses to manage their online presence, for $65 million in cash. The New York-based startup’s solution, which began primarily as a way for restaurants to digitize and publish menus, will be integrated into Constant Contact’s local marketing suite and will be offered to small business owners on a freemium model, with rich content (pictures, menus, pricing etc.) remaining as part of the startup’s existing paid product.

Constant Contact has been making a push this year to expand beyond its flagship email marketing product, acquiring mobile deals play Cardstar in mid-January and back-end deals solution MobManager a week later.  In February, the long time local veteran launched a new promotions product SaveLocal in an open beta to existing Constant Contact customers.

The acquisition of SinglePlatform comes a day after fellow New York startup Yext scored $27 million in Series E funding to grow its business information management product, which the company launched in 2010 and pivoted to fully this past April. While SinglePlatform has remained largely focused on menus, Constant Contact positioned the company as a direct competitor to Yext in a press release announcing the news this morning, describing the service as “a single place to update their critical business information and delivers that information across a publishing network.”

The ensuing showdown between Yext and Constant Contact points to a wider question in the local marketing space: namely, whether single-feature services like Yext can compete and survive against all-in-one providers like Constant Contact. With other publicly traded companies like Groupon, Intuit, and even American Express have been moving to round out their local marketing suite (largely on the back of M&A,) we may be on the cusp of a wave of consolidation, and thus an influx of venture capital.

Steven Jacobs is an associate editor at Street Fight.