In our series of interviews with emailing platformsThis week, we welcome Mailin. Armand Thiberge, founder of Mailin, answers our questions.
Can you give us a brief history of Mailin? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
The first beta version of Mailin started during 2011; the stable version of Mailin was released in September 2012. We come from the web development world as I started my web development company in 2007 in India. We discovered emailing through our e-merchant clients who wanted to send their newsletters. From the beginning, we designed the solution to be scalable, meaning that it could adapt to any type of customer, any volume. Today, you can manage and segment a 5 million email base with Mailin.
What makes Mailin unique? What distinguishes you from other players in this highly competitive market?
The market is indeed very competitive. Almost every month, new players offer a new solution. For a few years, the "historical" players of emailing routing have made a lot of money (too much) with models based on sales teams criss-crossing France; I think some have forgotten the product. It is normal that these players are now challenged.
Just as you had web 1.0 and web 2.0, you have emailing 1.0 and emailing 2.0. Emailing 2.0 takes advantage of technological innovations revolving around the Cloud, Open-source and SaaS.
These new emailing 2.0 solutions allow you to do more for less. Mailin is one of these new entrants in emailing 2.0 and is aimed at a very wide audience: from small businesses/independent workers to marketers and e-retailers. We designed our service to be very easy to use, simple, beautiful and functionally very rich with a very powerful segmentation engine. I hope the result lives up to this ambition.
What What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the world of emailing?
The challenge of emailing remains deliverability: making sure that marketing campaigns reach the inbox. Today, and despite the promises of our competitors, which I understand well, deliverability is above all the responsibility of the customer. The challenge today is to explain to our customers how and at what pace to solicit their customer base. Many e-merchants have gone too far and have in my opinion too aggressive emailing strategies; it's up to us to explain to them but it's sometimes not very easy when you see the ROI of emailing campaigns.
Mobile and social networks are 2 other major challenges that are very important in the medium term.
What What are the next evolutions of your platform?
We work a lot on the product. We have a development team of over 15 people. Today, our activity is almost exclusively around loyalty emailing. Today, we have a free solution for transactional emailing that we launched a few months ago. The customer feedback is very good. The graphical interface allows you to see live emails leaving, being delivered, being opened on your screen. I think we are the first to offer a real time graphic.
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
We also want to offer a conquest emailing solution because many of our customers ask us for it. In the short term, we still have a lot of things in the pipe:
- a new template editor 100 % "email responsive
- Improved interaction between our SMTP solution and our marketing solution
- management of transactional email templates
Is it that you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
Yes, Mailin's "freemium" mode is very generous: the free mode allows you to access all of Mailin's features and send an unlimited number of emails for a base of less than 2000 contacts. We will revisit our pricing policy in the coming weeks and our Freemium solution will be a little less generous. Notice to fans before the update 🙂
What do you get out of it?
We are a young solution that is gaining visibility every day; the freemium model also allows us to become known through word of mouth. This strategy has allowed us to have more than 3000 customers in less than a year and a double digit monthly growth.
What is the What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
I don't know if there really is a French emailing market: most French players are present internationally. In the same way, we see quite a few foreign players attacking the French market.
The incumbent players are facing a lot of new entrants who are challenging their dominant position. It's an interesting period. The importance of smartphones, the growing interconnections of information systems imposes to propose "email responsive" templates and to propose ever more powerful APIs.
There is still a lot of innovation to be done; I think we are still in the prehistory of email. The "I shoot my entire database every day" mode is now over. Tomorrow, there will be much more behavioral in emailing, more targeted campaigns. BigData allows today to realize complex emailing strategies that were not possible even 3 years ago. Moreover, direct marketing will also be done tomorrow on social networks and this is obviously an important challenge for us. I think it's still too early to know what direct marketing will look like in 5 years but it's clear that email still has a great future ahead of it, provided it innovates of course.
A last word to conclude?
Thank you very much for inviting us and congratulations to the badsender.com team for creating this blog on emailing: a lot of exciting info on emailing!
