For this first interview from emailing providerwe welcome Click and Site with its director Régis Bacher.
Can you give us a brief history of Clic et site? When was the company founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
Clic et Site was created in 2006 as a traditional web agency. After 3 years of providing traditional services to e-merchants, Clic et Site joined the ITL group (French leader in postal address rental) to become its specialized e-marketing subsidiary. The idea for Clic et Site is to propose integrated email marketing services within a complete service offer around multi-channel direct marketing. Indeed, the ITL group offers in particular address rental, parcel asylum, telemarketing.... which allows real multichannel synergies with our email marketing offers. Of course, we take full advantage of our 30 years of experience in direct marketing to adapt the successes of paper-based direct marketing to the emailing strategies that we offer our customers.
In general, what services does Clic et site offer (and not only services related to emailing)?
In fact, Clic et Site has chosen to only offer services related to emailing since this is what we know how to do best. We are an email marketing agency as other agencies are specialized in search marketing or social marketing for example. We frequently collaborate with other hyper-specialized agencies on large web marketing strategies requiring the intervention of several expert agencies.
Among these services, which ones are related to emailing?
I usually classify our services in two main families. A first one with services adapted to the acquisition emailing like the renting of email files, the collection of addresses, the email retargeting, the newsletter insert (purchase of banners in the newsletters). All these actions are aimed at recruiting new prospects. A second part of our services is rather oriented towards customer loyalty. We offer full service newsletter management, email enrichment or trigger marketing strategies. In addition to that, and whether it is for acquisition or retention strategies, we offer a graphic design service for emailing and training around email marketing.
How much of your business is dependent on emailing?
I would say a good 90%! There are still some side activities but the bulk of our business is done by email marketing.
What makes Clic et Site special in the email file rental market?
I think our specificity in this market comes from our synergies with our parent company ITL. Being in the same premises as the French leader in postal address rental has enabled us to learn very quickly and to understand the difference between a good and a bad file. In this market, the main added value we bring is our experience and knowledge of files. Our offer contains more than 300 files, some hyper segmented, others more general, some at CPM, others at CPC. The trick is to make the right choice in line with the client's target and objectives.
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What solution do you use to send your emails?
We use the Inxmail platform, one of the biggest German routers whose French subsidiary is located in Alsace like us. We take advantage of this to develop together a real competence center on email marketing in the East of France.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
In these turbulent times, the most important challenge for me is to implement a real loyalty strategy in email marketing. And when I say "real strategy", I mean the global reflection on the strategy, the layout of the creatives or the relevance of the offers and their segmentation. There are still far too many players who are content to send "the newsletter of the month".
Another challenge to take up on the side of the creation of emailing: the responsive design. Nowadays, we can't really ignore the fact that emails are read on cell phones. The increasingly frequent use of emails on the mobile boosts the opening rates, so we might as well take advantage of it intelligently.
Finally, the last challenge, even if we have already heard a lot about it, is undoubtedly the multi-channel strategy. And this is the issue that we are trying to address on a daily basis with our group.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for innovation?
The French emailing market has experienced major problems over the last few years, especially following the massive and uncontrolled use of affiliation platforms by advertisers. All this is now coming back to order and many major players have understood that it is now necessary to do clean emailing to protect their image. We are therefore heading towards better days where loyalty emailing and acquisition emailing will both go towards a more and more refined qualitative targeting. And that can only be good for the emailing market.
A last word to conclude?
Thank you for allowing me to inaugurate this new section for email marketing players. I will follow it with attention in your next newsletters because the more specialized players there are able to give sound advice to e-merchants, the better the email marketing market will be!
