At the beginning of June, I had the chance to be received for a few hours at Publicis ETO. It was an opportunity for me to discover the beautiful offices of the agency (located near Lille) and to discuss with the team in charge of managing eCRM campaigns.
- Could you tell us a few words about your respective backgrounds?
Bérengère Devise: For a little over two years now, I have been an email marketing consultant at ETO. My mission is to support the clients of the agency, and now of the group, on their email issues and on deliverability questions. Before that I spent almost 4 years at Experian as a marketing project manager and before that I did a stint at 3 Suisse. I've been immersed in email for a while now.
Alexandra Buirette: I've been with ETO since 2006 and my background is completely different from Bérengère's. I worked for ten years at Pizza Paï, first in product and then in operational marketing. I worked for ten years at Pizza Paï, first in product and then in operational marketing. I joined ETO's service division in 2006 as multi-channel production project manager, where I mainly worked with Leroy Merlin. I then became an account manager. In 2011, as the email channel was developing rapidly at ETO, I was asked to take over and develop the email campaign management activity with a full service offer (HTML integration, campaign management, expertise and deliverability) to which the SMS channel was then added.
At the beginning there were only two operators, there are now 5 project managers. They provide full service on behalf of customers on various market platforms such as Experian, Neolane or Selligent and rely on a team of integrators specialized in emailing.
- How many people are dedicated to email marketing at ETO?
Alexandra: There are a total of 8 people dedicated to email in the services division, but that doesn't include the design teams and the data management teams. These teams are also essential to the production chain.
- For many years, ETO has prided itself on being an independent agency, and this was part of the way the agency sold its projects. Following the takeover a year and a half ago, what has changed in the way the agency operates and in the client approach?
Alexandra: I would say that on the day to day operation it hasn't changed. We've kept our DNA. This has brought us many business opportunities, and the opportunity to work on cross-functional projects with the entities of the Publicis group.
- Does this make it easier to bring in new clients that you would have had a harder time convincing without Publicis?
Bérengère: It's obvious. Even if nothing has really changed in terms of organization and day-to-day operations, this opens up great prospects for us. We can now approach accounts that we would never have approached if we were only ETO. It also allows us to work with other entities of the group on issues that we would certainly not have tackled alone. I'm thinking in particular of the support provided by Publicis China on deliverability issues in Asian countries.
It's rather nice to know that in any case, whatever the problem, wherever it is, we will always have a contact with whom to discuss this type of subject in the Publicis network
- In the other direction, did it also allow you to bring your expertise to others in the group?
Alexandra: In fact, data marketing was an expertise that was not yet present in the group. So in fact, this allowed Publicis to create an agency with expertise in data marketing. We work in close collaboration with Publicis Modem.
- In recent years, few major developments have occurred in email marketing. For the past three or four years, we have been focusing on two major subjects: automation and mobility management. Do you think that these are the only major projects underway or do you think that there are other revolutions underway?
Bérengère: I think that responsive design is the big revolution of the last few years. It's a topic that continues to be important because not all advertisers have switched to this technique yet.
But, it's still moving on other things. We exchange with partners like LiveClicker and other similar platforms. This allows us to test new innovative techniques in email such as real-time personalization, video, countdowns, ...
I think there is a real demand and expectation from the advertiser side for these solutions. For the moment, the first tests have not yet been very conclusive insofar as the compatible webmails are still in the minority, at least for video.
This is really the main expectation in email today, more dynamism, to make the content evolve in real time, ...
- As far as real-time email is concerned, do you rely more on existing solutions or do you plan to develop some in-house?
Bérengère: We have a real problem with the cost of these new products. The offer proposed by the turnkey solutions is very attractive, but when you scratch the surface, you realize that the return on investment will be slight. As far as video is concerned, there is still a big problem of email client compatibility which does not allow us to go as far as we would like.
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Beyond personalization, the other major evolution is oriented towards the user experience, on more targeted customer journeys, with a real desire on the part of advertisers to move towards one to one.
Alexandra: You can't forget about deliverability. For the last two or three years, that's all we've heard about. It's another big topic.
- It's not really a revolution in the marketing sense of deliverability?
Alexandra: No, but it's an issue that everyone has their eyes on.
- 5 years ago, ECRM was email, today it's much more than that. Do advertisers understand all the opportunities of push notifications, web personalization, ...
Alexandra: I think it will come, but I find that our clients have great difficulty implementing ultra-personalized campaigns even though they have been talking about it for many years.
We have an expert role to play in helping them implement this type of campaign, they have little knowledge of the subject. Very few implement automated cross-channel customer journeys.
- What's stopping the advertiser today from getting there?
Berengaria: I think that initially there is a problem of competence and knowledge. They ask around, they know that this is the way to go. But the basics are rarely mastered and even less implemented. From there, it's very complicated to say that they are mature enough to develop a cross-channel contact plan, to push further than what exists today. I think that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of evangelizing good practices, but we shouldn't go too fast either.
- When you try to accompany them in this direction, what are the tools you put in place today to achieve this?
Bérengère: What makes us strong at ETO is that we have experts in every field to call on. So it's easy for us, when we detect a customer need, to deploy internal resources to propose personalized contact plans with marketing experts, experts on creative issues, experts on print, etc. This often results in workshops.
- In the market, whether they are your customers or not, are there examples of email marketing and eCRM programs that you take inspiration from and ideas from?
Bérengère: We don't draw much inspiration from what is done elsewhere. We avoid working on models to be reproduced in order to try to offer programs that are very personalized according to the client and the brand's history.
Alexandra: Our specialty is customer knowledge. We always start with data intelligence before designing adapted programs.
Bérengère: Nevertheless, we all know great programs like Vente Privée for example. But it's mostly a question of product and concepts that allow us to bring out all the creativity available in the email channel.
- In terms of email deliverability, how do you keep up to date?
Bérengère: We do a lot of monitoring and reading. And what makes us strong is that we have many contacts all over the world. There is always someone at Publicis who has experience on a specific subject and with whom we can exchange information.
We also have regular contacts with our ESP partners who can also provide us with information. More recently, we have been working a lot with Return Path on these subjects.
Alexandra: We can take advantage of your question to address one of our news. We have just signed a partnership with Return Path, a global specialist in Email Intelligence, whose objective is to play on the complementarity in order to associate their technical expertise with our Data / marketing expertise to propose a new consulting offer in Email Marketing called "Deliverability Audit and Marketing Practices". This joint offer will enable advertisers to optimize the performance of their email marketing programs in the long term.
Bérengère: Thanks to them we can really go further. Until now, we were offering deliverability audits that covered many topics but were very much oriented towards best practices and marketing. Return Path offers us a complement on infrastructure and performance aspects by webmail.
