Marketing automation is a big topic right now on Badsender! We complete the subject today with the publication of this interview with Henri-Maxime DucoulombierCTO of Marketing 1by1 and Martin Perretcustomer manager.
Jonathan Loriaux: Can you tell us in a few words what Marketing 1by1 is and what you do there?
Henri-Maxime Ducoulombier We are publishers of a software that combines omnichannel trigger marketing and product recommendation. Our solution enables intelligent and personalized dialogue with each contact of a brand or advertiser. We identify them and use their offline and online interactions (on/offline visits, purchases, product reviews, etc.) to deliver the right message at the right time. These proven behaviors will trigger and serve as the basis for communication with the brand's customers and prospects. Thus, 1by1 allows advertisers to increase and enhance the engagement of each of their contacts.
JL: Today, there are a lot of solutions on the market that offer marketing automation. Does the term "marketing automation" suit you, or are you focusing on a different concept?
HMD Yes, marketing automation is the right term to describe what we do. Our version 2, which has been available since September, allows you to create very quickly automatic campaigns that will be prioritized. In other words, we can manage commercial pressure in just a few clicks. We use technologies that allow us to work with all the data models of the different brands and advertisers without having to build a new model each time. We can therefore adapt to the specificities of each of the end customers, advertisers and brands.
We also want to offer a natively omnichannel solution. And omnichannel not only in output, which is very important, but also in input. We really use all the data that is made available to us, both for our targeting engine and for our product recommendation engine.
JL: Compared to other platforms that claim to do marketing automation, what is the big difference with your competitors?
Martin Perret There are several elements. There's our data model that's different. We can handle more data than we used to. We can do much more precise data interactions. And then we also add value to the data we get.
Then, there is marketing support, but also technical support to help our users to implement best practices, to implement and optimize the chosen scenarios.
We also provide our clients with recommendations on how to communicate with a customer. Advertisers often focus on the message, but the offer and timing of the message are just as important. We try to guide our clients on these topics.
Another element that can differentiate us from the market is the fact that the entire 1by1 marketing software is exposed in the form of an API that can be integrated with existing software and information systems.
JL: Isn't one of the big differences the fact that you don't manage the message itself?
MP : Indeed, we work with a network of partners including campaign executors with whom we will exchange flows or files to send messages, but we are not ourselves a campaign executor.
JL: What is the reason for a company to start looking at an external solution for manage triggers and marketing automation ?
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MP Companies don't have the time or resources to manage these technologies internally. It would take too long to get into the technical side of things, to understand how it works, to find people who are competent in the subject, and yet it is an urgent need for marketing departments. As I said earlier, advertisers are looking for advice, for best practices. They hear about trigger everywhere, but they don't know how to apply it.
For this reason, most of them are now looking for support. It is therefore the lack of technical knowledge on the subject and the lack of human resources that make companies need to turn to external solutions.
Today, in all brands, they say "Ah, but the trigger is an integral part of my communication strategy. Everyone else is doing it, why not us? Why do we stay with our mass emails and why don't we switch to a little trigger at the beginning and then get into the loop, like this?" And then, change this strategy a little bit by saying "well, now that we see that it works, we stop the mass email and we stay on the trigger... we stay on the trigger all the time". So you have to keep up with the times, use the right methods and the right tools. And in this case, I think we are a very good tool.
JL: To operate a platform like yours, you have to get a certain amount of data out. In some companies, this is quite complex, mainly at the political level. Getting a product catalog out is still fairly easy to do, but information on purchase history, putting in tags, possibly getting out consumer profiles... Isn't this a hindrance to the deployment of the projects you manage today?
HMD It's true that we need as much data as possible, but we have to look at things differently. The more data the client provides us with, the more relevant we will be, the more interesting the results the engine will produce, both in terms of targeting and recommendation.
The advantage of 1by1 is that we can already connect to existing data sources. We have developed an ETL brick to retrieve data from the advertiser's various sources and we don't necessarily have to ask them to recreate new flows. Often, retailers already use output feeds, either to exchange data between their internal tools, or to product catalog platforms, etc. On the other hand, the tag we need to retrieve navigation information integrates perfectly with existing tools in companies, such as Google Tag Manager, Tag Commander or others. We have therefore developed a tool that will allow us to take the data from wherever it comes from.
The objective is not to ask the partners or the end customer to reconcile their data before sending it to us. We will take care of this work and we will ennoble the data to make it available in our engine. This is also part of 1by1's work and part of our added value. Finally, we will add data ourselves, via our tag or via beacons. This is new data that the retailer did not necessarily have.
JL: Can customer and prospect data be anonymized in your platform?
MP : Yes. Of course. So in V2 of 1by1, we can work only with the IDs and without the personal information. In this case, there will be a reconciliation between the IDs and the personal data that is in the advertiser's or campaign executor's information system. If necessary, we can also work on servers with encrypted file systems, although this may have a cost in terms of performance and licensing.
JL: In this type of project, there is often tension between the marketing and technical departments. On the one hand, the marketing departments would like to exploit all the possibilities, and on the other hand, the IT departments who are perhaps a little more realistic about agendas, development processes, etc. How do you manage the tensions between these different departments? Where do you fit in between marketing and technology?
MP We are well aware of these tensions between the marketing and technical departments. But today, we don't need to fight anymore. Our solution gives us the ability to get rid of those tensions. It's technical, so yes, we're going to manage flows and input data and also connections to campaign management solutions. But today, we're able to reuse existing data streams for other needs, most of the data we need is already available, and we're working to use it as is.
The marketing department will say, "I'm going to put this in this place, I'm going to put that in that place. When creating scenarios, the technical department no longer needs to intervene. Thanks to the interface, everything is done in a few clicks. You choose who you want to target, how you want to target them, with what. And then, afterwards, the solution takes care of everything.
No more need for technical intervention in the creation of very complex queries where you have to search on this or that table, this or that data. All that is well and truly over. If marketing wants to go fast, the technical side doesn't want it to take up too many resources. We combine the two to make a fast and efficient product for everyone.
