Testimony: "Captain Train's marketing is above all its customer experience".

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 startup that was created in 2009 with a simple objective: to revolutionize the sale of train tickets on the internet. We sell train tickets from SNCF, iDTGV, Eurostar, Thalys and Deutsche Bahn.

Our goal is simple: to make buying a train ticket an enjoyable experience. To achieve this, we have chosen to focus on the train. We also decided not to put any advertising on the site. Our job is not to sell brain time to advertisers but to allow our customers to buy their tickets efficiently.

In general, Captain 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 goal is to provide the most pleasant service possible. Because we hate spam and it is often considered unpleasant or intrusive, we take great care in using email marketing. 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 loyalty but rather about information and service.

To give you an idea of the size of the site, since the site was launched in private beta (March 2011), we have only done two emailings. It's also a question of internal resources: we always prefer to focus on improving the site and on customer service, rather than on any marketing action. Two newsletters in two years is very little, especially compared to "classic" e-commerce sites that do not hesitate to bombard people with almost daily emails. So we think we have room to do a little more, without annoying our customers. So this medium is bound to grow in the future but we will always try to make sure 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.

Even the largest companies are regularly victims of email deliverability problems. How do you manage this aspect? What tools do you use to send your emails?

It is precisely the large companies that use and abuse emailings. Don't be fooled, the recipients consider this as spam, because it is most often the case. This is therefore taken into account in the analysis criteria of the large mailbox hosts.

Conversely, a virtuous circle is created when we respect our customers: with more than 99% of transactional emails, our emails are never marked as spam, and thus our deliverability is very good. Moreover we respect the state of the art of what is done at the technical level: signed emails (DKIM), SPF declared in our DNS, email plaintext, etc.

As for the tools, everything is developed internally concerning the creation of the mail and the management of the unsubscription of the newsletter. Concerning the server part, we use the opensource components postfix and opendkim.

Do you use a noreply email address in your emails? If yes, why? If not, is this address linked to your customer support system?

With our obsession with customer service, noreply addresses would almost be an aberration. For the customer, it is frustrating and painful to have to look up how to contact a site/service when they could have done so immediately by replying to an email sent by the site. Our automated emails are therefore deliberately sent with our customer service address. If customers have a concern, question or suggestion, they can easily tell us about it by responding directly to our emails.

Coming back to your product, what are the new features planned for the next few months?

Our mobile applications are highly anticipated and we are working hard on them. We can't wait for them to see the light of day and their release will be an important step in the development of Capitaine Train. More generally, we have lots of ideas and projects in the pipeline to continue to simplify the purchase of train tickets. Maybe we can tell you about them in a future emailing 🙂

A last word to finish?

Kamoulox! On a more serious note, thank you for giving us a voice on Badsender. I don't know if our approach to emailing will be of interest to your readers but I think it will at least have the merit of being quite different from what we see on most e-commerce sites.