Emailing-Factory interview: "Emailing is constantly evolving and there is no shortage of challenges to overcome".

After several weeks of absence, we are back to our cycle of interviews with email solutions. This time, you will be able to make an opinion on Emailing-Factory with the interview of Laurent Rajca, President of HPJ France.

Can you give us a brief history of Emailing-Factory? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?

Emailing-Factory is a mailing platform that was developed by HPJ Solutions in 2008 to meet the needs of its customers. It was first marketed under the name HPJCC (HPJ Communication Center) in Canada before being available in France since September 2012 under the brand Emailing-Factory following the opening of our offices.

What makes Emailing-Factory unique? What makes you different from other players in this very competitive market?

One of the main assets of Emailing-Factory is its proximity to its customers. All customers of the platform are called and trained in order to make the most of the solution's potential. We are very attentive to our customers and it is not uncommon for them to be at the origin of new features that meet their needs.

Thus, in addition to the classic functions of emailing solutions, Emailing-Factory offers specific features that meet the needs of SMEs: a validation workflow system, a powerful contact management system that is also used as a CRM by some of our customers, complex filters to target certain customer profiles, etc...

On a technological level, our API gives a lot of possibilities to Emailing-Factory. Many of our customers use it to extend the functionality of their own software. At the same time, our connector system allows us to synchronize heterogeneous systems without human manipulation. This type of functionality offers the possibility to implement very powerful internet marketing strategies at a controlled cost.

Finally, our business model is based on an unlimited number of mailings and we only charge by the number of contacts with very competitive rates. This way of proceeding allows us to avoid the interest of spammers, who prefer a single sending to a large number of contacts, and to offer a better deliverability to our customers.

What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?

Emailing is constantly evolving and there are many challenges to overcome. I think the 3 most important ones are :

1. Mobility Responsive and social network integration are two features that are increasingly requested by our customers. Changes in usage mean that emails are increasingly read on mobile devices but emails rarely adapt to these interfaces. The responsive emailing is a real technological challenge considering the very different way of working of the different messaging systems.
2. Deliverability Deliverability remains an issue in emailing because webmails and antispam players are constantly trying to adjust the rules so that their users are not overwhelmed by unwanted emails. Today, nobody can guarantee a deliverability rate of 100%. The emailing construction and the contact base cleaning have become crucial to avoid that the emailing is considered as undesirable. It's up to us to educate and accompany our customers so that they can have the best possible return on investment.
3. Segmentation of contact bases Marketers are increasingly targeting their customers to bring them a personalized message that arrives at the right time with an offer that corresponds to them. Mass mailings are going to be less and less used because the results are not always up to the mark. The qualitative will progressively take precedence over the quantitative.

What are the next evolutions of your platform?

We have many projects in progress and several developers working full time to make the platform evolve with a new version every month.

Among other things, we are in the process of completely redeveloping our newsletter creation which will be divided into 3 parts: an interface for neophytes with dozens of predefined templates, a second for simply creating a newsletter without having to touch the code, and finally an "expert" mode for creating html code directly within the tool.

Since a few days we offer a function to manage time zones at the account and user level.

We are working on an important evolution, we are going to allow our customers to make newsletter campaigns of type Survey. Thus, it will be possible to use its contact base to send surveys.

By September we are coming up with an evolution of our API to use emailing-Factory as a transactional emailing solution. In other words, it will be possible to use the API in an application to send emails (account opening, password loss, etc.) This service allows our customers to have a higher open rate with their software.

Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?

Absolutely, it is important for us that our customers can test the platform and we offer them to use it for free up to 200 contacts, or even 5000 contacts if we have developed their website. A free training is offered to all our customers.

What do you get out of it? 

This allows us to regularly come into contact with companies that are often looking for ways to communicate effectively through the Internet, with which channels to use with their customers, we advise them on the various options available to them.

What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?

We arrived relatively recently on the French market. Many players are already present and customers are increasingly aware of emailing practices.

Nevertheless, we still meet many companies that are discovering emailing and this market still has a great potential of evolution.

Why do you think there is still room for new players like Emailing-Factory?

The emailing market is nowadays dominated by companies that focus on the automation of the service. We believe that there is a niche for a company that offers software but also a support service.

A last word to conclude?

First of all, I would like to thank Jonathan for interviewing us and for keeping this blog which is full of information about emailing.
Then, our team is always available to train you and answer all your questions about Emailing-Factory.fr and on emailing and the web in general.