After a few weeks without any email router interviews, we welcome today Julien Tartarinfounder and CEO of the startup Mailjet.
Can you give us a brief history of Mailjet? When was the platform founded, by whom? Has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
The adventure began in May 2010 when I discussed for the first time with Wilfried Durand an idea that was in my head, to create an emailing platform to facilitate the life of developers. Wilfried was immediately enthusiastic and a few days later he mentioned it to Thibaud Elzière (founder of Fotolia) during a conference.
Then, everything happened very, very fast! A team was formed and a beta version was presented at the Le Web 2010 exhibition. Early 2011, the first version is deployed and mid-2011 we hire our first employees. Two years later, we have just passed the milestone of 40 employees ... and it's not over yet!
What makes Mailjet unique? What sets you apart from other players in this highly competitive market?
Mailjet was developed by developers for developers! The heart of our solution is really the deliverability aspect. We provide developers with tools (API, smtp relay, etc.) that enable them to integrate emailing into their projects as simply as possible.
For example, there were no plans at all to integrate a newsletter creation within the platform. Because we needed it internally, we made it available to our customers. This tool only uses our API to function, and we offer our customers the possibility of integrating it into their platforms. Spreadbutton, for example, does this with its Social CRM platform.
Another specificity of Mailjet is its technology developed entirely in-house. This means that we have full control over our costs and are able to offer some of the most competitive prices on the market. It also allows us to offer a no-contract, no-commitment model. All of our customers are free to leave whenever they want, at no extra cost.
To conclude with the specificities of MailjetI can also mention our anti-spam policy which is extremely restrictive! We do not accept any purchased database and we carry out a rigorous monitoring to detect those of our customers who do not respect these rules. We often close access to some of our customers in order to preserve our excellent relations with ISPs and webmails.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
First of all, I can't help but mention deliverability! This is a concept that is unfortunately still too poorly understood! However, the influence of deliverability on campaign performance is far from negligible. Can you really afford to have your confirmation emails arrive in the spam box of your customers?
According to the latest reports from Return Path, in Europe, 3% of emails arrive as spam, and even worse, 13% of emails are blocked without you even realizing it. Today, your reputation as a sender is not only based on your IP address. The domain is taking over. This means that your reputation will stick to you. Where previously it was possible to start from scratch by changing your sender, tomorrow it will no longer be possible! And nobody wants to change their brand name every six months.
Then, one of the other challenges of emailing today is the professionalization of the whole emailing chain, and not only newsletters and other advertising emails. Transactional emailing offers a much higher level of reactivity than any newsletter and yet it remains the poor relation of emailing.
In third place I would mention the use of emailing in mobile situations! Not to ride the wave that has been agitating the emailing world in recent months, but simply to highlight the radical change in usage that is taking place.
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What are the next evolutions of your platform?
At the moment, we are in the process of completely overhauling the deepest layers of our platform. For the past two years, we have been experiencing a very significant growth in the number of emails sent. To give you an order of magnitude, while it took us two years to send our first billion, it then took 8 months for the second and only 4 months for the third.
When this overhaul of our foundations is complete, it will also be much easier for us to visibly evolve the platform. There are already plenty of new things planned on our roadmap, but we prefer not to communicate on this one 😉
Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
Yes !
If so, what do you get out of it?
Mailjet gives free access to all the features of the platform with a limit of 200 emails sent per day. This model allows our customers to test the platform before switching to one of our paid plans. This is very important for developers, for example, who can test the effectiveness of our API or our plugins during the analysis phase of their projects.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
There is always room for innovation! Email may be an old medium, but it is evolving as fast as its environment: mobile devices, cloud technologies, filtering technologies, authentication, ...
The French emailing market is a mature market, but one that has lost its ability to surprise and reinvent itself in recent years. Today, we are faced with a few well-established behemoths that no longer excite the crowds. However, the technological environment has never evolved as fast as it does today, so it is imperative to adapt. Who can still understand in 2013 that an API can be a paying option in an emailing tool? Not us!
A last word to conclude?
The easiest way if you want to make an opinion on MailjetYou can visit the website and register for free on the platform. On the other hand, our team regularly participates in events all over France and Europe, whether it is during a Hackathon, a meetup, come and discuss and drink a beer with us!
8 réponses
Hello,
This is an exciting interview for me who follows interested in entrepreneurship. It's a dream to see a start-up with so much success, billions of emails sent in a few years, it's strong. You are a success story.
Regarding mailjet, I think the platform is really professional, and from what I read in the answers to the questions, it is easy to use. Because with easy to understand and drag and drop blocks, it's bound to be appealing.
Thanks again for this article.
I tried Mailjet ...
Result: campaign blocked (400 emails left out of nearly 20,000), without explanation, 2 days later, still no news from the support (contacted via the mailjet website, via their Facebook page, by phone (answering machine)).
Of course, it was a paid offer, no compensation (since Mailjet did not contact me again) ... Our account was blocked without any explanation or warning message. We only realized it when we wanted to send a campaign...which did not go out!
Contact of the support then answer.... 2 days later (what a reactivity...!). We had supposedly high complaint rates, whereas all of our mailings and databases are clean and we have a "Safe & Secure" certification from ReturnPath, a certification obtained following an audit of our email practices...
I pass on the impossibility of removing his credit card from the site (incredible)
Conclusion : VOID, I formally advise against
I needed to do a large group mailing related to a professional event: it fell through!
"We had supposedly high complaint rates
Many times a complaint rate can more than justify a blocking by a sending platform, this is a highly legitimate practice in their leader 🙂
Hello,
I also advise you against Mailjet as Autran and many others. The offer seems attractive at first, but you risk like many people like me using this service to lose time and money. A bad deliverability with emails going directly to spam, a customer service that does not respond and if by chance they respond, do not provide any solution or advice to solve the problem.
One piece of advice before going to Mailjet is to take the time to read the many negative reviews about them, which I unfortunately did not do.
BE CAREFUL WITH MAILJET! The offer seems attractive at first, but you will have regular problems with them and you will see the poverty of their service .... SPAM that is unproven and that leads you to locages ... while Mailjet itself admits that it has technical problems .... and a lousy customer service! When you provide them with their own statistical figures that indicate the opposite of the figures they announce in their warning email, they do not provide any solution or advice to solve the problem except for standard useless answers to cover their incompetence.
STRONGLY NOT TO BE ADVISED
DECEPTION with mailjet ,
It is easy to subscribe, but not so easy to unsubscribe. You will have to search for a long time for the possibility to unsubscribe from this company.
The only recourse I have found is to call on their assistance.
I had to give a reason to stop this service (always nice to justify oneself...) in the end the person of the assistance agrees to unsubscribe me.
SURPRISE, it is taken directly from my account two monthly payments, although I no longer use their services.
RESURPRISE, I learn that my account is not closed, (bravo the assistance ..) the new person of the assistance, Alissa, realizes of new closing of my subscription, but does not find trace of my step, for lack of proof specifies me that I am not refunded.
MEFIANCE, before committing yourself, consult the reviews, opinions of users, you will avoid surprises
Hello,
Because I paid to route 150,000 professional emails and the service was interrupted without warning after 30,000 sendings, I feel cheated by MailJet but while waiting to contact the fraud control, I let you make your own opinion by consulting our exchanges:
Me:
Hello,
Still no contact from your support department since this morning.
My access is still not restored and I don't know what's happening to my account or my campaigns.
Thank you for your quick feedback
Cdlt
MailJet:
Hello,
As stated in your previous ticket, our deliverability team has reviewed your account and unfortunately a decision has been made to terminate your account effective immediately. We will therefore no longer be able to offer you any further emailing services from this day forward.
Wishing you a good continuation,
W.
Me:
Hello,
Thank you for your answer.
Nevertheless I do not understand your decision:
1/ I admit, and this is my only mistake, that I forgot to check the presence of the unsubscribe link as recommended by the CNIL and the LCEN (I'm writing this from memory) following the creation of my html (I'm not a technician, but I knew this rule and this is my very first mailing). Given your technological mastery, your platform should have detected the absence of link and blocked my campaigns beforehand: a simple alert message would have been enough to make me react and ask my integrator to correct the error
2/ For the rest, the emails on which I routed are B2B, and what's more they are generic email addresses therefore in the public domain. Therefore no authorization is necessary from the companies to be valid since I prospect the Internet users within the framework of their function and not in a private capacity.
3/ It seems that your radical decision is a way for you to protect the reputation of your servers and that of your company, that I understand and I am even sensitive to it as a young entrepreneur. On the other hand, cashing the subscription and then blocking a customer account without prior warning seems to me at worst fraudulent and at best professionally clumsy,
For all these reasons, I thank you either to allow me to reuse my account and to explain your famous rule that I did not respect or to credit my credit card of the amount pro rata numerus of the not consumed emails.
I thank you for the favorable and amicable follow-up that you will give to this file.
I am looking forward to your reply and send you my best regards
Cellos
MailJet:
Hello,
The decision is final, unfortunately, because we operate on the principle of IP reputation, which implies that your mailings are as close to perfect as possible (well received, opened, clicked, never marked as spam or unsubscribed).
For more information, please see our terms of use:
http://fr.mailjet.com/Conditions-d-utilisation.htm.
I'm sorry, but you consulted and validated our terms of use and our anti-spam policy when you registered, which you bypassed by exposing yourself to a blocking from us.
Our Deliverability team will have to refuse to issue a refund, I'm sorry.
Sincerely,
So, dear readers, what do you think?
Hello,
Thanks for this article! Mailjet still has some advantages over its competitors like Mailchimp or Sendinblue, especially on its API and integration with third party tools. To give readers the benefit of additional information, I would like to share another source that we have just published, our review of the email marketing solution Mailjet : http://www.lafabriquedunet.fr/email-marketing/outils/mailjet/
Thanks again and see you soon,
Adrien.