Interview with ContactLab: "a true strategic approach to email marketing

This week we welcome the emailing platform ContactLab dans notre cycle d’interviews ! C’est Arianna GalanteGeneral Manager of ContactLab France, who answers our questions. Can you give us a brief history of ContactLab? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure? ContactLab was born as a web agency in 1998 in Milan, Italy. This year we are celebrating our 15th anniversary! At that time the company was called Tomato Interactive. In 2011, our founder and CEO, Massimo Fubini, passionate about the web and especially about technology, faced with the growing potential of email marketing, had the intuition to start developing an email routing platform in-house. The platform, called ContactLab, quickly became the market leader in Italy, and Tomato focused on email marketing, taking the name of its software in 2010. ContactLab is now the undisputed market leader in Italy and an increasingly European player, with an increasingly international team and customer base, branches in France and Germany and a presence also in Spain and England. The business model has evolved over time with the addition of new services. Dès 2008 nous avons commencé à construire une agence interne avec l’objectif d’accompagner les clients dans la gestion de leurs campagnes, de la stratégie à l’exécution à l’analyse des données. Par la suite nous nous sommes aussi dotés d’une équipe de statisticiens et d’analystes pour gérer des projets de business intelligence, nous appuyant sur les résultats des analyses pour aider nos clients à optimiser leurs stratégies d’email marketing. Nous avons donc des clients self-service, qui utilisent la plateforme en totale autonomie, des clients en full service, qui travaillent avec des équipes complètes d’account managers, développeurs html, concepteurs-rédacteurs, DA mais aussi project managers techniques, programmeurs et analystes, et des clients qui bénéficient de nos services à la carte. L’objectif de Contactlab est d’être l’expert de l’email marketing, en mesure de répondre à toutes les attentes de nos clients. What makes ContactLab unique? What distinguishes you from other players in this highly competitive market? Notre spécificité est l’étendue de nos services. Nous apportons une véritable approche stratégique aux programmes d’email marketing, de CRM et de communication de nos clients et nous sommes en mesure de les accompagner dans toutes les étapes. Nous croyons au rôle de pont que joue l’email vers toutes les initiatives d’une marque donc nous proposons aussi d’autres activités autour de l’email marketing, par exemples des sondages, des mini-sites, des jeux-concours, et des initiatives sur les réseaux sociaux. Avec une gamme de services aussi étendue, nous sommes un véritable partenaire pour nos clients, qui avec nous trouvent en un seul fournisseur la réponse à des besoins très variés techniques, pratiques, analytiques et stratégiques. What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world? The 3 biggest challenges for advertisers right now are:

• Organizing email marketing efforts: Email marketing has proven itself and advertisers are almost unanimous in their desire to use it more and better, by diversifying messages, by having an approach that is not only tactical but also strategic, all while guaranteeing a rapid time to market. It is in this logic that many companies that until now managed their campaigns internally are starting to ask for support from email marketing specialists. It is not necessarily a question of outsourcing everything, but more and more of being accompanied in the validation of certain choices or in the identification of new communication paths.
• Data analysis and use: Faced with a huge amount of data to understand, process and analyze, it is sometimes difficult for advertisers to rationalize the information, reach conclusions and develop action plans accordingly. They are however aware that data is a key element in optimizing email marketing campaigns and maximizing ROI. The challenge is to invest in this aspect, internally or externally, in order to have a better knowledge of their customers, prospects, buying habits, sales levers in order to personalize the dialogue with each contact and thus increase the revenue generated by email marketing.
• True customization of communication cycles: There is a lot of talk about personalization, but too many campaigns are still managed in a "spray & pray" mode, one message to the entire database, without taking into account the people we are addressing. Today, we are able to build real personalized communication paths for our contacts, whether they are new, loyal buyers, inactive customers, etc., paths that generally obtain excellent results. The challenge is to implement these programs, step by step, by analyzing data, developing hypotheses, testing options and observing the results.

What are the next evolutions of your platform? La principale évolution en cours sur la plateforme est autour de la visualisation des données. Notre section reporting standard est déjà très riche et notre équipe de business intelligence travaille parallèlement sur les données pour customiser les datas et les rendre adaptés aux besoins de chaque client. Justement parce que nous croyons en l’immense richesse des chiffres, la prochaine étape est un approfondissement de notre approche de “visual intelligence” ou “discovering through visualization”, un travail de fond sur la présentation des données afin de faciliter leur compréhension mais surtout de découvrir des tendances ou des corrélations. Nous serons en mesure d’en dire plus en quelques mois ! Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)? No, we are not proposing it. Why not use this model? Since we believe in services and support for our customers, a "Freemium" model would not correspond to our positioning. We offer a free tool, but it is a different type of service: a powerful competitive intelligence platform developed in-house, newslettermonitor.comwhich I invite you to discover. What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations? The email marketing market is not yet mature, there are certainly still many new challenges to face, but above all many email marketing best practices are far from being applied everywhere. France is more technologically advanced than other Southern European markets but there is room for a more qualitative email marketing, more respectful of the final consumer, and which really offers him value. A last word to conclude? Je ne peux que conclure avec le mantra de l’email marketeur, la pertinence : le bon message, à la bonne personne, au bon moment. Si on respecte cette règle très simple, on est forcément sur la bonne voie. Bon email marketing en 2013 !