Perhaps better known than the platforms of the first three interviews, we're back in this cycle with Sarbacane. It's a Mathieu Tarnus its general manager who answers our questions.
Can you give us a brief history of Sarbacane? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
It all started a little over a decade ago at GOTO Software. At the time, one of the company's activities was to develop and publish several professional utilities software around the Internet and email, including the famous Sarbacane. This software was a great success from its launch, especially on the target of SMEs.10 years later, many things have changed, Sarbacane has become a company in its own right with the creation of Sarbacane Software, we have also made a shift in our strategy to focus more on SaaS and the service business.
Today Sarbacane is a global solution allowing both the creation and the management of its campaigns from a simple and intuitive interface, but also a high performance platform of routing and analysis of the returns; high performance, both for its flow capacities, and the quality of our delivery rate.
What is the specificity of Sarbacane? What distinguishes you from the other players in this very competitive market?
To have always remained faithful to the SME and to offer a solution in adequacy with their needs and especially their means. What sets us apart is that we have industrialized all our distribution, use and training processes for our tools. Our customers are completely autonomous, they manage their subscription, they prepare their campaigns themselves. Of course, such an organization requires us to be more vigilant about the use that our customers may make of the solution. In the back office we analyze all the campaigns and make sure that they respect our anti-spam charter. We are also available to our customers if necessary for any technical or commercial problem. This allows us to manage a much larger number of customers than other players. Today we are 35 at Sarbacane Software, and we claim the status of French leader in number of active customers with 6000 subscribers.
Finally, another big difference is that we remain focused on small and medium volumes. 70% of our customers send less than 5,000 mails per month, very often a hyper-targeted newsletter to their customers. We do not look for "big deals" at Sarbacane Software, we even avoid them as much as possible. Of course, it is more work, but it brings us more security, more independence and less reputation and deliverability problems.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
3 is a lot to ask đ An important point, anti-spam, webmail and ISP solutions are becoming more and more sensitive to users' inclination towards commercial mails. Obviously any measure undertaken by these players to restrict the commercial pressure of Internet users, will lead to a general decline in the performance of Email Marketing. Apriori this is a danger. That being said, I am the first to be satisfied that the bull is finally taken by the horns. Let's stop kidding ourselves, our addresses are being clobbered with so-called opt-in mailings and newsletters. If we do nothing, it is a total disinterest of users for the email tool and a fatal outcome for the email marketing business. Measures to regulate commercial emails will force some actors, especially those operating on a performance basis, whether for their own account or for their clients, to deeply modify their commercial strategy, often focused on volume.
The other major issue is responsive emailing. The explosion of the use of smartphones for email consultation pushes companies to adapt their communications for this support. We are already well ahead on this subject since our integrated studio regularly performs mobile responsive optimizations. We will go even further on this subject with the next version of Sarbacane.
What are the next evolutions of your platform?
Even if we capitalize on our difference, that of being a software to be installed interconnected with a sending platform, we are sensitive to the arguments of light applications, such as access to customer data from any computer and location. Our next solution will allow users to transfer their data to the cloud and thus benefit from shared access to their campaigns, results, contact lists, etc.
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In addition, we work a lot in R&D to facilitate the management of campaigns, to offer more tools to achieve an attractive and efficient email.
Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
Absolutely, it's the best way for our customers to check if our solution is in line with what they are looking for. In fact, we are going to push this mode even further in the 4th generation of our software which will be released in 2013.
We encourage readers to download the evaluation version on this page !
If so, what do you get out of it?
This mode allows to discover the software, the quality of our services, but also to make known our solution through an appropriate communication in all the "freemium" emails sent by our users. We have not invented anything, hotmail and yahoo messengers were precursors on this system đ
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
It is a rather atypical market in the sense that most of the demand from companies is met by local players such as Sarbacane, which was born about ten years ago. The penetration of foreign players seems more complex than in other countries, probably due to the language barrier. Otherwise, I think we have reached a certain maturity in the large account segment. On the other hand, for small and medium volumes, there is still a great deal of potential, especially with very small businesses.
Concerning the innovation, it is permanent. Even if it is based on a protocol that has hardly changed for 20 years, the e-mail marketing business moves every day. Deliverability, rendering, social networks, responsive content, split-test, so many expressions that did not exist in our vocabulary 10 years ago, yet they have become today the selling points of our solutions, and tomorrow there will be others to replace them. Every day we have to question ourselves and evolve in the face of an extremely dynamic information technology environment.
A last word to conclude?
Thank you Jonathan for this initiative which will be useful to all those who are interested in emailing. I invite the readers of this blog to also read ours which regularly delivers tips, tricks and best practices around emailing, it's here ! (https://blog.sarbacane.com/)
