Airship Acquires Conversational Commerce Pioneer ReplyBuy to Accelerate Expansion Into Mobile Commerce

MTS Staff Writer

September 24, 2020

For the first time, Airship will extend its platform beyond customer engagement to directly enable commerce, payments and customer conversations

Customer engagement company Airship announced that it has acquired ReplyBuy, a company that pioneered fully integrated solutions for payments over SMS. This move extends Airship’s platform beyond customer engagement to directly enable commerce, as well as power one-to-one customer conversations via two-way SMS. In addition, Airship plans to extend ReplyBuy’s technology to provide turnkey commerce and payments solutions across more marketing channels, messaging platforms and industry verticals.

The acquisition will provide companies of all sizes a single platform to create, manage and optimize cross-channel customer interactions and drive greater revenue more quickly. Airship’s real-time mobile data, predictive AI and unified approach to customer journeys ensures relevant messaging at the optimal time on customers’ preferred channels across app and web notifications, SMS, email, mobile wallet and more. Subsequent digital actions customers take, now including purchases and conversations over SMS, provide rich user-level insight for journey optimization as well as data enrichment of other business systems. A broad ecosystem will benefit from Airship’s expertise in real-time data streaming and bi-directional martech integrations, and from ReplyBuy’s tight coupling with CRM and sales solutions.

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“For over a decade, Airship has been the driving force in helping many of the world’s largest and most disruptive brands succeed in digital transformation, and the acquisition of ReplyBuy opens up an exciting new chapter,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Airship. “With ReplyBuy, we will provide an additional way for customers to increase their revenue and deepen customer relationships with one-to-one conversations. We’re thrilled to welcome the ReplyBuy team to the Airship family.”

ReplyBuy helps more than 100 brands quickly and efficiently engage, converse and transact with customers, through a simple, streamlined SMS solution proven to increase sales. Professional and collegiate sports teams, as well as entertainment venues, use ReplyBuy for the easiest and fastest ticket sales possible, while companies across higher education, non-profit and service-based organizations have seen tremendous success streamlining fundraising, membership renewals and appointment bookings. Airship will continue to sell, enhance and support ReplyBuy’s solutions, as well as enrich the Airship Customer Engagement Platform with new commerce and conversational capabilities.

“Nobody directly connects more brands to mobile consumers than Airship,” said Brandon O’Halloran, CEO, ReplyBuy. “Joining Airship offers ReplyBuy the opportunity to serve the global market with a more comprehensive solution across more industries, and provide more valuable mobile customer experiences.”

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Beyond technology, the ReplyBuy team brings unique know-how in commerce, payments, and ticketing that will accelerate Airship’s efforts to eliminate friction in mobile customer experiences. ReplyBuy CEO Brandon O’Halloran will become Airship’s GM of commerce and CTO & co-founder Anthony Saia will lead the commerce engineering team.

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MTS Staff Writer

MarTech Series (MTS) is a business publication dedicated to helping marketers get more from marketing technology through in-depth journalism, expert author blogs and research reports.