This week, in our series of email router interviews, we discover the marketing platform ExactTarget. If you have an opinion on the platform, please let us know in the comments.
Interview:
Can you give us a brief history of ExactTarget? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
ExactTarget is one of the world's largest SaaS software platform providers for marketing departments, based on its results, size, number of customers, and annual growth rate.
ExactTarget was founded in 2000 in the United States. The company has grown by leaps and bounds since then. The year 2012 saw us grow by 38% compared to 2011. We are the 9th largest player in the SaaS world, eight steps behind Sales Force for example. The company, now listed on the NYSE, was founded by three partners, two of whom are still running the company, and Scott Dorsey is the CEO.
Our business model has evolved as the platform's features and services have grown, but so have the new markets we are reaching and the trends in digital marketing over the past 12 years. Most importantly, we remain committed to a SaaS model based on subscription-based service offerings. This is the best model for companies today, the one that is essential, and that will allow them to better adapt their Information System to the challenges they face.
What makes ExactTarget unique? What sets you apart from other players in this highly competitive market?
It is indeed a very competitive market.
What sets us apart is that we offer our customers an integrated solution developed by our engineers. We integrate within a single platform the advanced functionalities on 4 digital channels that are e-mail, mobile including mobile push, social and Web.
We also offer campaign automation and scripting applications like Automation Studio and Interaction Studio.
We provide marketing departments with real tools for managing consumer behavior, segmentation and targeting in dynamic mode. In particular, through our Audience Builder and iGoDigital tools. The latter allows for recommendation and remarketing based on the subscriber's navigation on the merchant's website.
But the power of the platform does not stop there. We recently acquired one of the leaders in BtoB lead management: Pardot. And we are in the process of integrating it into our platform.
Beyond this functional aspect, our great strength lies in the availability and service level of the platform.
With a team of over 400 consultants and marketers, we can address all of our customers' operational and strategic issues to make the most of the tools available to them through ExactTarget. We produce a new version of our platform every six months.
Finally, ExactTarget is extremely easy to use. The Interactive Marketing Hub is a uniformly user-friendly platform that is very user-oriented. 95% of our customers are self-sufficient, and our training tools are very powerful, such as the now famous and much envied 3sixty portal.
What are for you the 3 main challenges for the next months in the world of e-mailing?
E-mail remains the essential link in the communication chain that marketers set up with their customers and subscribers. But it is no longer the only means of communication. It is part of a cross-channel approach.
The first challenge will be to finally bring together the skills and actions of multiple channels into a more global strategy. For a long time now, companies have been using different channels, which has led many of them to manage this approach in silos. But times are changing and more and more companies have started redesign projects to address the unification of all these channels in an integrated operational framework. E-mail, mobile, social, web, it all fits together. And technology allows to bring together the functions necessary for this regrouping.
All advertisers have realized for some time that they are sitting on a gold mine: the data collected and stored for years. But how do you approach the question of how to manage it and, above all, how to make the most of it in a simple and relevant way? Here again, our tools integrated with cross-channel operations management can work wonders. But above all, it's about using these analyses to bring the right message at the right time and on the right channel to your customer or subscriber.
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Finally, the third challenge is personalization. And this idea requires the massive use of technology. Not only does the message have to include relevant information and/or offers, but it has to be triggered at the right time and, again, sent on the right channel. This aspect of things can take a complex aspect like updating inbox emails to the much simpler one of automatically triggering a welcome program to a new Facebook fan.
The functions of our platform and the applications dedicated to the management of interactive and real-time communication now make it possible to meet these three challenges.
What are the next evolutions of your platform?
We invest 50 million $ each year to improve our application and technology offerings. It is crucial that we maintain this lead for the benefit of our customers. Our development plan (or Roadmap) is ambitious and affects the entire platform. Here are some of the innovations planned this year:
- The release of our new tool for managing the "journey", and marketing programs at the individual level. Called "Interaction Studio". It's a big step forward for our platform and allows us to define at the consumer level the management of an automated workflow according to his interaction with the brand. And all this in a very simple user interface.
- The availability from today of our new tool "Discover" which is a real BI tool integrated to the platform and which allows anyone to create, modify or improve dashboards from any part of the database. We talk about a real "cube" in the definition of the statistical data processing axes.
- Extended Push mail and SMS functionalities. Including new geolocation features.
- More and more advanced functions in the management of the e-mail channel. We can mention the Responsive Design functions. More advanced mobile adaptations of the e-mail such as Pre-Header design. Easier and more numerous segmenting functions. More complete Data Extension functions including simplified exports, etc.
- Announced last November, Playbooks will become more numerous. These are real functional "kits" that allow marketers to have automated toolkits that allow them to focus solely on content. For example, "Welcome Pack" or "Abandoned Cart" or "Birthday Campaign" Playbooks. We expect to have more than 60 of these in the future. They are very popular with small businesses that are looking for simple and concrete deployment solutions. Let's not forget that 2,000 of our customers - out of 8,000 - make less than 5,000 Euros in sales with us each year. We must also think about them.
The list of new features does not end there.
Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
This is a marketing method that we have looked at closely, but it does not quite fit our offer.
It is a very fashionable mode and corresponds well to the domain of single function applications or games. But in the context of transactional solutions like ours, it is much more complex to implement.
If you take the simple e-mail tool for example, the configuration of a dedicated IP environment as such takes weeks to set up and "warm up", which negates the test effect of the Premium model.
On the other hand, we provide in our contracts the possibility to test our application, under certain conditions.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
The emailing market in France is doing well, because as long as the growth of e-commerce is positive, it will generate even more emails.
Our recent SFF (Subscribers, Fans and Followers) study from last December (www.exacttarget.com) demonstrates the perenniality of the e-mailing channel. Think that even social networks, like Twitter, ask for confirmation of their subscribers' e-mail addresses to alert them of each new tweet! What is sure is that it will now be read more and more on mobile products. Like tablets and smartphones.
But the most important thing is not there. Internet users who use this channel are more and more demanding with the brands and those who hold their email addresses. If they consider that it remains an ideal means of communication between them and their favorite brands, they ask them to adapt their contents and to be attentive to the way these messages reach them.
And marketers know it. Companies now need to understand that their customers expect to receive the right offer at the right time and in the right format. That's the only way to continue to cultivate and grow this great channel.
ExactTarget remains one of the largest providers of e-mailing solutions, serving more than 8,000 customers through this channel. But it only makes sense today if it is integrated into a multi-channel approach to customer relations, and if it provides relevant and expected content. And this is only possible if we do a lot of work upstream on data and the analysis of each consumer's expectations.
Today's marketers and the brands that continue to gain market share, even in times of crisis, have understood this issue.
