Interview with Cabestan: "Ensuring a strong link between the customer and the brand requires customer knowledge

This week we find Cabestan in our cycle of interviews with email platforms. Cabestan was in the news in 2012 following its acquisition by Mediapost. Can you give us a brief history of Cabestan? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure? Cabestan was founded in 1998 by 5 partners: Daniel Breton, Lionel Hubschwerlin, Philippe Simonetti, Jérôme Gays and Jean-Benoît Lacassagne. Since August 2012, Cabestan has been a company of MEDIAPOST Communication, a communications group specialized in relationship marketing. Active since the beginnings of the Internet, Cabestan's business has continued to evolve over the past 15 years. Originally specialized in the simple distribution of email marketing campaigns, over the years Cabestan's activity has evolved towards the management of increasingly personalized and automated campaigns, taking into account the needs and expectations of consumers. We have also gradually integrated other customer relations channels. Today, Cabestan offers a true multi-channel marketing campaign management platform in SaaS mode. It's a complete tool capable of executing marketing actions on email, mobile, telephone, mail and social networking channels, while taking full charge of the integration and routing of email and SMS campaigns. Our expertise is multi-faceted and comprehensive: from building a unified customer view to executing multi-channel marketing campaigns and analyzing returns, via customer journey automation and behavioral targeting. Of course, mastery of all channels requires the associated services and know-how: data hosting and enrichment, postal address processing, RNVP (Restructuration Normalisation Validation Postale), deliverability and integration of email marketing campaigns. Backed by advanced projects with major accounts such as Tape à l'œil, Gallimard, Orange, NAF NAF and Renault, Cabestan has established itself as a key reference in multi-channel marketing campaign management. What makes Cabestan unique? What distinguishes you from other players in this very competitive market? This market has become increasingly competitive over the years. It's true that at some point we had to stand out from the crowd. We've always been convinced that the success of marketing projects hinges on customer knowledge. In 2008, we decided to develop our solutions around the use of data to obtain a global, 360° view of the consumer, and thus maximize customer knowledge. The data gathered by our online and offline operations provides a profile of the individual the brand wants to reach. Digital channels and more traditional ones, such as postal mail, complement each other to enable a targeted, well-thought-out brand strategy. Cabestan centralizes customer information from different sources (email, points of sale, website, mobile, CRM tools, offline marketing campaigns, etc.) into a single marketing database, the Marketing Datamart. Cabestan also offers all the solutions associated with data quality: TIA processing, rectification, postal address normalization, NPAI, bounces. Cabestan has already designed and implemented the Marketing Datamart for major market-leading accounts (Kiabi, NAF NAF, PSG, Renault, NRJ group, GDF Suez...). Aware that data management is a crucial and sometimes complex issue, we support our customers throughout their project: from the analysis and design phase, right through to the go-live phase. We also provide personalized advice by analyzing the state of our customers' databases and the results of their marketing campaigns. What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world? Experts agree that within 2 or 3 years, there will be more Internet connections via mobile than via a conventional computer. We need to prepare for this trend. Mobile marketing and its new media, such as push notifications, will become an increasingly important part of marketing strategies. This is due to the real proximity that these channels establish with consumers. Brands are now deploying their offers on a truly multi-channel basis (email, website, app, SMS), and more and more of them are testing push notifications on apps. One of the great advantages of this channel is geolocation. For example, the app can send a notification as soon as consumers are near a brand store. These are great ways of generating traffic to these points of sale. The development of 4G will make the mobile, and therefore m-commerce, a purchasing channel in its own right. The future of mobile is also social. Half of Facebook's audience already comes via this medium. The challenge is to reinforce the synergy of these tools. The steps linked to social CRM will gradually be put in place: qualifying customers' social audiences, setting up influence scores, linking the eCRM base and Facebook to encourage community growth, as well as socializing media with share buttons and creating viral animations (contests) to generate traffic and interaction. What are the next evolutions of your platform? In a few weeks' time, we'll be releasing a new version of our platform, offering improved visualization of the data and performance of our marketing campaigns. It includes management of new communication channels such as social networks and mobile, as well as more traditional customer relations channels such as mail and telephone. And in less than 3 months, we'll be integrating another channel into our platform: push notifications on mobile applications. Our customers will be able to send personalized push notifications to users of mobile applications on iOS and Android operating systems. Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)? No, we do not offer a free version. If yes, what do you get out of it? If not, why not use this model? By using our platform, our clients entrust us with their subscriber data which is extremely valuable to them. They also trust us with the availability of our platform, with which they build their marketing strategy, which constitutes a large part of their company's turnover. More than anything else, they want to be accompanied and receive personalized advice to take their marketing strategy to the next level. What do you think of the French emailing market? Are we or is there still room for new innovations? The death of emailing has often been announced and it is not! Each time, we have seen that the new features are complementary to the technologies already in place. It is obvious that reading media are moving towards mobile. Advertisers must therefore ensure that their media are well adapted to the new screens. Emailing, as such, is becoming more mobile and more social, but it is important to keep in mind that Internet users want above all to receive relevant information according to their interests and needs. They are also more demanding in the notion of immediacy. It is therefore on customer knowledge and multi-channel interactivity that we must play. A last word to conclude? Ensuring a strong link between the customer and the brand requires customer knowledge and personalization. This is the real strategic challenge with a real impact on the performance of companies.