Salesforce Is Buying Braze. It Got Me Thinking About ESP Migrations.

On October 20, 2026, Salesforce announced that it had agreed to acquire Braze for approximately $5.66 billion. It’s a big acquisition for the marketing technology industry, bringing one of the leading customer engagement platforms into the Salesforce ecosystem. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, subject to the usual approvals.

There’s going to be plenty of discussion about what this means for Braze, its customers, and Salesforce’s existing Marketing Cloud products. Will Braze keep operating independently? Will the platforms become more closely integrated? What happens to the roadmap, pricing, and partnerships?

We don’t know the answers yet, and I don’t think it’s particularly useful to speculate. Salesforce and Braze have both said Braze will keep building as Braze, which is encouraging, and there could be some real benefits from bringing the two companies together.

But the announcement got me thinking about the long history of acquisitions in email marketing, and one of the biggest problems marketers run into when they eventually need to change platforms.

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We’ve seen plenty of acquisitions in email marketing

I’ve worked in email marketing for a long time, and acquisitions have been part of the industry for as long as I can remember. Matt and I both worked at Lyris, which was acquired by J.L. Halsey in 2005 and then Aurea in 2015. I was at Campaign Monitor when Emma and Delivra joined the business in 2018, and I also worked at Liveclicker, which was part of Zeta’s acquisition of Marigold’s enterprise business last year.

Over the years we’ve seen Oracle acquire Responsys and Eloqua, Salesforce acquire ExactTarget and Pardot, Adobe acquire Marketo, and Intuit pay around $12 billion for Mailchimp. Selligent, Sailthru and Cheetah Digital have each changed ownership several times and ended up at Zeta Global as part of that same Marigold deal in 2025.

It’s remarkable how many of the platforms we’ve used over the years have changed hands. Here are some of the more notable ones.

A brief history of email marketing acquisitions

Platform	Acquisition history	What happened afterward
CheetahMail / Cheetah Digital	Experian (2004) → Vector Capital (2017) → CM Group (2022) → Marigold → Zeta (2025)	Multiple changes in ownership, branding and corporate structure.
Lyris	J.L. Halsey (2005) → Aurea (2015)	Became Aurea Email Marketing. Lyris-branded software has continued to receive support.
Pardot	ExactTarget (2012) → Salesforce (2013)	Now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Eloqua	Oracle (2013)	Still operating as Oracle Eloqua.
ExactTarget	Salesforce (2013)	Became the foundation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Responsys	Oracle (2014)	Still operating as Oracle Responsys.
Silverpop	IBM (2014) → Centerbridge / Acoustic (2019)	IBM’s marketing software business was sold and became Acoustic.
Bronto	NetSuite (2015) → Oracle (2016, through NetSuite)	Oracle discontinued the Bronto Marketing Platform in May 2022.
Selligent	HGGC (2015) → CM Group (2020) → Marigold → Zeta (2025)	Multiple ownership changes, now part of Zeta Global.
Marketo	Vista Equity Partners (2016) → Adobe (2018)	Continues as Adobe Marketo Engage.
Campaign Monitor / Emma	Emma and Delivra joined Campaign Monitor (2018) → CM Group → Marigold	The brands continue under Marigold and were excluded from Zeta’s 2025 acquisition.
Sailthru	CM Group (2018) → Marigold → Zeta (2025)	Multiple ownership changes, now part of Zeta Global.
Mailchimp	Intuit (2021)	Acquired for approximately $12 billion. Revenue declined in fiscal 2026 and Intuit now runs it as a separate segment.

Some of these acquisitions have worked out well. Marketo is still an important part of Adobe’s marketing platform eight years after the deal.

Others have been more mixed. Mailchimp is still Mailchimp, but five years after Intuit paid $12 billion for it, revenue has started to shrink and Intuit now runs it as its own separate segment.

And some went very differently. Bronto is probably the clearest example. Oracle announced in 2021 that the platform would be discontinued the following year, and customers were given a deadline to move to something else, whether they wanted to or not.

There’s also a quieter outcome that I think is more common than either of those. The product keeps running and customers stay on it, but development slows down once it becomes one part of a much bigger portfolio. Oracle Responsys and Eloqua are good examples. Both are still around and still used by some big brands, but the general perception in the industry, and I’d agree with it, is that neither has changed much in years. Nobody announces this kind of thing and there’s no single moment you can point to, but a few years later you realize the platform hasn’t moved while the rest of the market has.

And Selligent, Sailthru and Cheetah Digital have all been through multiple ownership changes, mergers and rebrands. That doesn’t mean the products are worse off, but it shows how much can change around a platform over time.

The point isn’t that acquisitions are bad. Companies change ownership, priorities shift, products get consolidated, and occasionally platforms disappear entirely. Those decisions can have a big impact on customers, even though customers have very little say in them.

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We’re rooting for Braze

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting Braze is headed the way of Bronto, or that anyone should start looking for an alternative.

We’re close partners with Braze, and it’s our second most popular ESP integration at Email Love. We work with a lot of Braze customers, and I really hope this acquisition is a huge success for both companies and the people who use them.

There are good reasons for Salesforce to want Braze’s real-time engagement capabilities, and combining them with Salesforce’s CRM, data and AI could create some interesting opportunities.

But even if everything goes brilliantly, it’s a useful reminder that the platforms businesses depend on can change. And if that change ever means moving to another ESP, the amount of work involved can be enormous.

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Moving to a new ESP means rebuilding your templates

Anyone who’s been through an ESP migration knows it’s a major project. You need to move your customer data, rebuild segments, reconnect integrations, set up deliverability, migrate your automated journeys, and test everything while making sure campaigns keep running.

The part I think gets underestimated is rebuilding all of your email templates.

Think about a reasonably large marketing team that’s spent years building out its email program. They might have hundreds of templates covering welcome journeys, abandoned carts, lifecycle campaigns, transactional emails, promotions, newsletters and dozens of other automated messages.

If those templates were all built and maintained inside the current ESP, moving means a lot of repetitive work. Someone has to recreate each template, adapt the code, set up the new platform’s personalization and dynamic content, test across inboxes, and put everything back through approvals.

Even if each template only takes a few hours to rebuild, test and get through approvals, a few hundred templates adds up to months of someone’s time, and that’s before you’ve improved a single email.

It’s a real pain, and it can get expensive.

What’s frustrating is that you aren’t improving anything. You might have a perfectly good set of templates that your designers and marketers are happy with, and you’re spending time and money rebuilding them because you’ve decided, or been forced, to change the platform that sends them.

It raises a question I’ve been thinking about for years. Why are we building and maintaining our emails inside our ESPs in the first place?

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Your email design system shouldn’t be tied to your ESP

Most marketing teams already use Figma for their brand guidelines, design systems and reusable components. But with email, the usual process has been to design in Figma and then rebuild it in the ESP’s drag-and-drop editor, or have a developer turn it into HTML.

That leaves you with two versions of the same thing: the original design in Figma, and another version inside your sending platform that has to be maintained separately. If you change ESPs, that second version usually has to be rebuilt all over again.

That’s one of the reasons we built the Email Love Figma Plugin and Email Love Builder the way we did.

With Email Love, your email design system and reusable components live in Figma, separate from whichever ESP you use. Designers build and maintain the components there, and marketers use those approved components to create emails in Email Love Builder without recreating the designs in another editor.

When an email is ready, Email Love generates production-ready HTML and exports it to your ESP. We support Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Klaviyo, Customer.io, Mailchimp and many others.

So if you decide to change ESPs, you don’t have to rebuild your email design system from scratch. Your designs and components are still there, and you can export your emails to another supported platform instead of recreating everything in a different builder.

This doesn’t get rid of the rest of the migration. Your journeys, segmentation, data integrations, platform-specific personalization and other technical setup still need to be moved and tested, and depending on the platforms involved, your templates may still need some adjustments and QA.

But it takes a big chunk of design and production work out of an already complicated project. For a company with hundreds of templates, I think that’s a big benefit, and one that doesn’t come up often when people evaluate email building tools.

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Flexibility is worth having even if you never switch

I have no idea how the Salesforce and Braze deal will play out, and I hope it goes well. If Salesforce keeps investing in Braze and makes the product even better, that’s great news for the customers and partners who depend on it.

But I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that acquisitions, mergers, rebrands and changes in direction aren’t going away. We can’t control what happens to the vendors we work with, but we can make decisions now that give us more options later.

For me, that’s one of the biggest benefits of Email Love. It makes building emails faster and helps teams produce better, more consistent HTML, and it also means your email design system and production process don’t depend on a single ESP.

You can keep using the platform you love for as long as you want, knowing that if you ever need to move, your designs and components can move with you. Changing ESPs is hard enough without rebuilding all your emails too.

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Learn more about how the Email Love Figma Plugin and Email Love Builder help marketing teams build emails independently of their ESP.