Capitaine Train is a startup active in the sale of train tickets on the internet. The concept of their service is radically different from what is done in the tourism sector today ... just like their use of email. Discover it !Could you describe the Captain Train project in a few words?Capitaine Train is a start-up founded in 2009 with a simple objective: to revolutionize the sale of train tickets on the Internet. We sell train tickets for SNCF, iDTGV, Eurostar, Thalys and Deutsche Bahn, and our aim is simple: to make buying a train ticket a pleasant experience. To achieve this, we have chosen to focus on the train. We've also decided not to advertise on the site. Our job is not to sell available brain time to advertisers, but to enable our customers to buy their tickets efficiently. Generally speaking, Capitaine Train is built around three principles: simplicity, speed and quality of service.What is the profile of your team today? How many people are involved in marketing and how many in the technical part?The 3 founders of Capitaine Train are engineers and have technical profiles. Today we are a team of 15 people, mainly composed of developers. Our team has a very technical culture. However, there are two of us who do not develop (4 if you count our office manager and the person who handles our development in Germany) and we are truly dedicated to customer service. Because Captain Train's "marketing" is above all its customer experience. Our customers are satisfied with our product and talk about it around them; this is our primary way of gaining customers today.When it comes to emailing, have you already started using this medium to build customer loyalty?Our aim is to provide the most pleasant service possible. Because we hate spam and it's often seen as unpleasant or intrusive, we take great care to use emailing with extreme caution. So we use it to give our customers really useful information that we think will be of service to them. For us, it's not really about building customer loyalty, but rather about providing information and a service. To give you an idea of the scale of our activities, since the site went into private beta (March 2011), we've only carried out two emailings. It's also a question of internal resources: we always prefer to focus on improving the site and customer service, rather than on any marketing action. Two newsletters in two years is very little, especially when compared with "classic" e-commerce sites which don't hesitate to bombard people with almost daily emails. So we think we have room to do a bit more, without annoying our customers. This medium is bound to develop in the future, but we'll always try to ensure that it doesn't get in the way of the customer experience.With the digitalization of tickets, transactional emailing must be a big challenge for you! What are the different types of transactional emails you are exploiting?Specifically we send automatic emails in the following cases:- For each ticket purchased from us: a confirmation email containing - if applicable - the PDF e-ticket(s) of the trip and/or the Passbook ticket.
- 24 hours before the expiration date of an option placed on a train ticket by a customer, a reminder email to avoid losing money.
- Once they have chosen it, we send our customers .ics invitations that allow them to easily find their train trips in their electronic agenda.
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