Welcome to my Martech SaaS Series where I’ll be breaking down how I engage with martech companies to drive pipeline, positioning, and enterprise growth. This first post covers my five-year engagement with Emarsys from 2017–2022, including the buildout of its media engine and path to acquisition by SAP.
The Situation
Emarsys was a strong mid-market SaaS with clear product-market fit, but it lacked gravity inside the enterprise CX ecosystem.
The company was founded in Austria in 2000 by Josef Ahorner, Hagai Hartman, and Daniel Keiper-Knorr. It ran bootstrapped for ~15 years before raising $55.3M total:
Series A: $33M (Sept 2015, Vector Capital)
Series B: $22.3M (Oct 2016, TPG Specialty Lending Europe)
By the time I came in, the business was established across the EU. Revenue was already well into nine figures and the product was mature. But the brand still read like a legacy email tool, not an omnichannel category leader.
The Challenge
Three things had to happen simultaneously:
Launch and establish real credibility in the US market, where we were effectively unknown and competing against entrenched incumbents
Reposition from “Email Marketing Systems” to a true omnichannel customer engagement and lifecycle personalization platform that could sit in enterprise buying conversations
Translate years of deep EU product expertise into clear, commercially viable messaging that US enterprise buyers could immediately understand and justify budget against
The product already supported multi-channel use cases, but the go-to-market motion, messaging, and sales materials were still anchored in email. US buyers were evaluating us as a point solution, which limited deal size, slowed sales cycles, and kept us out of larger enterprise conversations. The issue was misalignment between what the product could do and how it was positioned, packaged, and sold.
What I Did
I joined in 2017, post-Series B, about two years after the US office opened.
Important context: Emarsys spent ~15 years focused on Europe. So while the company was mature, the US presence was early and underdeveloped.
I made the decision to stand up a branded media hub (instead of relying on scattered content) and use that at the core of the inbound engine for the company.
I called it Marketer + Machine and launched it within a couple months of joining. For me, this was the cleanest way to centralize narrative, distribution, and audience growth under one system.
It lived on-site but operated as a distinct property (clearly owned and sponsored by Emarsys, but built for storytelling, audience-building, and consistent output). This is pure content marketing:
A dedicated media property with the explicit goal of building and retaining a subscribed audience who knows, likes, and trusts you.
I launched:
A brand new podcast
A resource hub / blog (included lots of long-form, evergreen articles. I still own the byline for the most-trafficked blog page on the emarsys.com domain).
An annual virtual summit
Everything fed everything:
Podcast → blog recaps → social distribution → email nurture
Editorial → summit topics → guest pipeline → sales enablement
The overall channel mix was essentially:
SEO + blog
Podcast
Gated assets
Webinars
Email
Annual digital summit
I worked cross-functionally with:
Demand Gen
Sales
Product Marketing
Design + editorial
External partners (SEO agency, podcast production)
The podcast really became the wedge, in my opinion.
I built a grassroots network of industry operators and influencers who we brought on to interview, including: Christopher Penn, Michael Brenner, Andy Crestodina, Jay Baer, Ted Rubin, Tim Kopp, Paul Roetzer, Kay Pay, Shep Hyken, Magnus Unemyr, Matt Heinz, Jay Acunzo, Denise Lee Yohn, Robert Rose.
These episodes were actually engaging to listen to. We treated them as fireside chat-style deep dives; not as self-serving promotional material. I milked each episode for all it was worth — using each for multiple purposes that included:
Full recap articles on the blog
6–10 social posts per episode
Pre-written sharing copy for guests
Deep prep to make guests look sharp → higher share likelihood
This compounded fast as the show quickly grew to the top of the charts in the business category on iTunes.
KPIs I owned:
Organic traffic
Pipeline attribution
Subscriber growth
Results
Over five years, I built a compounding media system that turned attention into pipeline and credibility.
Direct results:
Organic growth: +300% increase in organic traffic through SEO + editorial
Pipeline attribution: +20% pipeline attributed to content + nurture + ABM enablement
Revenue growth: +34% revenue growth to $175M ARR over 5 years
Strategic outcome: Helped establish Emarsys as an AI marketing leader ahead of SAP’s $500M acquisition
The Exit Reality
SAP acquired Emarsys for ~$500M in 2020.
SAP’s market cap in 2019 was roughly ~$28B. For context, that puts the deal at ~1.7% (~1/56) of what SAP was worth at the time.
Translation: This was a bolt-on acquisition for them.
I stayed ~2 years post-acquisition. Operationally, nothing dramatic changed — SAP absorbed the revenue engine and folded Emarsys into its Customer Engagement stack. They had their own content property called “The Future of Commerce” that existed separately and discreetly from the SAP brand, and still does. I wrote one article on it before I left so that I could say I published content for SAP. 😀
From the founders’ perspective, the timing made sense. Growth had plateaued and the omnichannel marketing market was saturated. The business had reached a ceiling as an independent player and had nowhere left to go, outside of grinding for incremental share against players like Marketo and HubSpot (which would have required disproportionate effort for marginal long-term upside).
Investor groups realized a solid return on invested capital, given their relatively late entry and the $500M exit. The three founders converted years of bootstrapped equity into a clean liquidity event, de-risking personally while securing the company’s future inside SAP’s distribution and customer base.
I also broke this down in an episode on my podcast last year, if you’d like to listen: https://contentcapitalist.substack.com/p/emarsys-journey-to-175m-arr-and-sale-9e7
In the next article, I’ll break down a multi-brand case study across HubSpot, Webflow, and Canva, and how I approached each differently as a drop-in advisor.
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