Today, we welcome Zanox in the columns of Badsender! Zanox is one of the main French players in the affiliate market... and is therefore faced with very specific deliverability and quality issues. Our two interlocutors of the day are Laurence HarrochHead of Publisher & Innovation and Yves-Marie Le Pors-Chauvel, Account Manager Publisher Emailing & SEM.
The interview
Could you tell us a few words about zanox?
Laurence Zanox was created in 2000 by three founders and is now owned by the Axel Springer group and Swisscom. Zanox is present in 11 countries and mainly in Europe, but we also have an office in the United States which is now managed via the UK.
This presence in the US was done through the acquisition of a local brand, so we are not present there under the name zanox, but under the name Digital Window.
For those who are not familiar with the subject, what is the principle of affiliation?
Yves-Marie The simplest way to summarize it is to see an affiliate platform as a trusted third party that connects advertisers and publishers. The goal is to offer publishers the opportunity to display the advertisers' ads. When the user who is on an advertiser's site makes a transaction or validates a form, the publisher receives a commission as a business contributor. What makes affiliation so unique and so attractive for advertisers is that it is based on a pay-for-performance model and that advertising is only paid for to the extent that it directly brings in revenue (in the case of sales) or commercial contacts if we are talking about lead generation.
What are the different types of transactions possible?
Laurence The possible transactions are all those of performance marketing, from the click, simply, for traffic creation objectives, to the CPL, i.e. the lead, and also the sale, the turnover. Our business model is to earn a commission on the various events that have been generated, whether it is a click, a lead, or a sale.
But if we are a technical provider, we are also a service provider as we serve as a trusted third party for tracking.
Does this mean that you are not always paid by performance?
Laurence This can happen. We can also offer our B2B tracking solution (interface) to advertisers who want to manage all their acquisition channels via a single interface.
Yves-Marie In general, we provide this tracking aspect to advertisers who already work with us in affiliation and who want identical tracking to obtain the same reference base for levers that they work with in affiliation platform and also in direct.
What are the specificities of email in the world of affiliation compared to other mediums?
Yves-Marie The differences are very important because email is much more technical than the other mediums we work with. A display banner, for example, will be placed on a publisher's site and will be displayed. With email, it's not as simple, you need to have a quality base, a quality email kit, that it's routed at the right time, that the message is well addressed, ...
With email, we have to deal with other players beyond the affiliate platform, the advertiser and the publisher, these are the various ISPs and spam filtering engines.
So the difference is that there is more technology and players when you do email than when you just do banner?
Yves-Marie Exactly, there's another third party that comes into the equation that we have no control over. So qualitatively, we have to be much more careful with email than with other mediums.
In the world of affiliate marketing and email acquisition, deliverability is a major challenge. What are the "tricks" that keep you performing well?
Yves-Marie There are elements at many levels, on the publisher's side, there is the quality of lead collection, the quality of the cleaning and maintenance of the base. Then there is the second brick, on the advertiser's side, beyond the intrinsic quality of the offer, it is the quality of the email kits that is important.
Often, there is no link between the advertiser's CRM and acquisition teams. The experience of the latter is often very weak compared to email, they will sometimes tend to use external agencies that are not necessarily specialized in email. For these reasons, it is not uncommon for us to receive email kits of relatively poor quality. For example, we have already received email kits that were composed of a single GIF.
Do you have an advisory role with the editors, or are they waiting? Do they have all the knowledge they need to do their job well or do you sometimes have to intervene?
Yves-Marie We have publishers who are pure players in email and who make 100% of their business through email. With those, in terms of expertise, there is no problem.
Others are multi-levers publishers, for example content sites that have realized that they have managed to build up a substantial database via their site. This can lead to a reflection on monetization and some people turn to us to ask questions. How to monetize my database? What are the best practices? And there, we can intervene.
But most of our email editors are very experienced on the subject and route a lot of messages.
Most affiliate platforms are part of an organization called CPA. What is its role regarding best practices and email in particular?
Yves-Marie : CPA stands for Collective of Performance and Acquisition. Originally, CPA stood for Collective of Affiliate Platforms, but as the association evolved and expanded there was a change in December 2014.
The main objective of the CPA was the email charter v1, we have now moved to v2 since October 2014. This v2 is intended to go further than the French law. The French law is already relatively well done on the collection of email and the obligation of consent. With the CPA, we wanted to go further to be sure to work with qualitative players who will not go and buy databases anywhere.
The restrictions on collection logic are very important. For example, the CPA prohibits the exchange of addresses within the same publisher's databases. When a publisher collects addresses via a contest, for example, it collects them for a specific database that must be visible on the contest, but it cannot collect them for all its databases.
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So the objective of the CPA is still mainly to address email related issues?
Laurence This was one of the first projects we launched when we created the CPA. On email, there was a lot of work to be done to regain growth. Although it was performing well, at one time, the email lever in affiliation collapsed because of the bad practices of some, the shared bases and numerous abuses.
The CPA today is much more than that.
Since the beginning of 2015, the Collective has undertaken its transformation by creating Colleges representing the business issues of Performance Marketing:
- The "E-marketing Technologies" College, where the objective is to harmonize and standardize our counting and working methods and also to deal with issues related to attribution and contribution, which are complex and too often arbitrary because they are still poorly regulated.
- The "Consumer & Community Benefits" College; the objective is to put promotional marketing back at the heart of the business, which has existed since the dawn of time but which must be addressed in an intelligent and effective manner.
- The "Acquisition Emailing" College
This new organization reflects the CPA's desire to send a common message to advertisers and public authorities via a strong collective that represents all Performance players on the French market.
How do you control the emaileurs? How do you control that there are no lead exchanges? For example, do you have a network of trap addresses?
Yves-Marie There are indeed technical means that have been put in place to carry out controls. The first means of control are the complaints that we regularly receive from Internet users and that we relay to the CPA. In some cases, we will ourselves generate complaints to the CPA.
We also monitor our network via test addresses, we also test the collection methods in order to verify that they comply with the CPA charter and the opt-in or opt-out decision made by the user.
We have already realized that we had been collected correctly for a publisher's A database and that we were then receiving emails from all of its databases. We therefore carry out checks and if anomalies are found, this can range from a simple warning so that the publisher complies to the total exclusion of the CPA.
To conclude this chapter, the members of the CPA commit themselves to work only with publishers who have signed the charter?
Laurence : Exactly, that's exactly it.
In email affiliation, are you able to exploit real-time personalization technologies? Countdown, geolocation of points of sale, ...
Yves-Marie These technologies are perfectly usable, but in practice, it remains difficult to implement. Today, the first barrier is the advertiser's will. Does the advertiser really want to use these technologies for acquisition when many of them do not even use them on their CRM databases? Secondly, we don't have the possibility of using these technologies with all publishers. Some have more or less rich collections. Some have postal codes, others don't, some have very advanced data collection with scoring, information on appetence, others remain on basic data, name, first name, gender and email address.
So unfortunately, today, we don't have the opportunity to work on customization and automation with all the publishers.
Laurence: Our role, with advertisers and publishers, is to be a force of proposal to move in this direction. But the initiative remains with the advertiser.
Doesn't the fact that the advertiser pays by performance affect creativity? For him, the lack of creativity will not radically change the situation, at least in terms of costs.
Yves-Marie That's not really the question. Today there are so many more fundamental points, that it is not yet a priority. There is a big effort to be made so that we can work with clean kits, which respect good practices.
Afterwards, we can go further, but first we have to go back to the basics in order to get back to performance on acquisition emailing.
From an operational point of view at zanox, what are the tools and what is the structure that you are putting in place to achieve this performance on email acquisition?
Laurence We have a "publishers" department, which is aimed at all our publishers but also at advertisers. This department is made up of "leverage" experts and Yves-Marie is precisely our email expert.
Expertise is our asset and our strong point. We have to be able to go beyond our customers' expectations. To do that, we have to be experts.
We also have a creative studio with web designers where we develop our own creative kits, whether they are email or banners. This studio works much more on email as the stakes are much higher than on banners. This also allows us to address the issues of responsive email.
On the other hand, we have also set up an offer (Flash Mail) which is a proprietary tool for the management of proofs in order to gain in reactivity on the uploading of email kits. This tool manages, for example, the addition of tracking and validation by the advertiser of these kits. We can therefore easily see any anomalies in the code, correct them, check that we have the right objects, the right senders and that the desabo links are correct. These proofs are then sent to the client for validation.
We are also designing dashboards that can be automatically sent by email to advertisers in order to show them email statistics that used to remain on the publisher's side, such as the number of emails sent, the opening rate, the click rate, ...
Finally, we have also developed our own solution for the deduplication of email bases, inter-publisher and/or deduplication via a repellent base at the advertiser's. This solution is part of our Email 360° commercial offer where we propose to our advertisers to deal with email as a whole, i.e. deduplication of bases, creation of email kits, sectoral benchmarks or optimization of deliverability.
