Today it is Jean-Paul LieuxAssociate Director of Dolist.net who answers questions in our series of interviews with players in theemailing in France.
Can you give us a brief history of Dolist? When the was the platform founded? Who founded it? And does the business model have How have you evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
Dolist was born in September 2000 from the meeting of several Web specialists. Among them : Denis Olivier, current technical director of Dolist, at the origin of the
development of the first mailing list tools; and myself, at the head of an Internet and Hosting agency at that time. Together we created our first ASP mailing platform, the Dolist-V8 platform, and we quickly developed our business model.
Initially based on a simple entry fee and on the volume of mailings, it has gradually been based on a system of renting our platform. In this context, the volume has lost much of its importance in favor of a subscription and a commitment to respecting the good practices of e-mail marketing. A much more qualitative orientation, more in line with our vision of the market.
Note that we also launched in 2010 a platform dedicated to transactional e-mails, the Dolist-EMT platform, which is mainly aimed at e-retailers.
What makes Dolist unique? What makes you different from other players in this very competitive market?
Two points really differentiate us:
- Our mastery and efforts to defend and promote legitimate e-mail. We have done a lot of work on managing our clients' reputations and on optimizing the deliverability of their campaigns. We have also joined the MAAWG (Messaging Malware Mobile), an international organization that brings together the largest operators of the e-mail marketing and Internet industry. Its objectives are to find the means to secure the e-mail marketing chain and protect Internet users. Please note that being a member of this organization does not only imply the payment of an annual membership fee. It implies the monitoring of our practices and our reputation, which in concrete terms is the sum of the reputations of our shippers customers. Unfortunately, most of our French competitors are no longer there...
- Our ability to support our customers in the implementation of good practices in and advise them on the best strategies to adopt. This includes as well as through the provision of free online resources (news review in online, white papers and surveys, a dedicated recommendations site, etc.) as well as the creation of consulting & strategy" services or marketing support. All these These elements are part of a guiding principle: to strengthen the relationship with our customers.
What are for you the 3 main challenges for the next months in the world of e-mailing?
First of all, the quality of the data and this, on the whole chain, from the acquisition of contacts to the enrichment of the contact base through its hygiene. I include in this idea the efforts of segmentation and scoring aiming at a better targeting and a greater relevance of actions.
Next, there is no doubt about the phenomenon of mobility. Growing, it has given rise to a new way of consulting messages. With approximately 24 million French people owning a smartphone today, the importance of the phenomenon is no longer to be proven.
On the other hand, a large part of them is sorry to receive emails that are totally unsuited to the mobile medium. And recent studies have shown how much the latter is still ignored in the message creation process with, among other things, emails that are too long, poorly structured or whose call-to-action size is too small to be used on mobile. While there is a very interesting potential on the mobile user target, mobile optimization of messages really deserves attention in 2013.
Finally, the last challenge is to develop the legitimacy of mailings and increase the adherence of contacts to messages. Beyond the respect that we must have towards Internet users, it is important today to offer them the possibility of controlling what they receive, from the type of content to the frequency of reception. Indeed, we know that ISPs are putting a lot of emphasis on the analysis of Internet users' reactions, whether positive or negative, to judge the legitimacy of a sender. This has a real impact on the reputation of the sender and on the deliverability of its e-mail campaigns.
What are the next evolutions of your platform?
First point, the continuity of our work to interconnect our platforms with third-party information systems (e-commerce platform, CRM solution, etc.), whether it is the creation of new connectors or the development of APIs and Web Services. The second aspect is the improvement of our database with, in particular, the expansion of data processing capacities (unlimited fields). Finally, the evolution of the segmenter of our e-mail marketing platform Dolist-V8 in order to give our customers the opportunity to process all the possibilities of crossing the various forms of existing data: declarative, behavioral, transactional or other external data.
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Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
No
If yes, what do you get out of it? If not, why not use this model?
This type of model is reserved for a low cost and/or self-service market. The best tool in inexperienced hands will only turn the tool into a mail cannon. This orientation goes against the objectives we have set ourselves and, more globally, against our policy.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
Until recently, most of the requests were oriented on the quantity of messages sent, a vision of the market that was totally integrated with the pricing policies of the routers. But recently, the various players have positioned themselves according to the various market segments: low-cost automatic platforms, publishers of multifunctional solutions (e-mail, CRM, datamining, Business Intelligence, etc.), service providers, etc.
mixing the technology and service approach, like Dolist or full service providers.
On the other hand, it must be understood that e-mail routing technologies cannot live independently of the technical and digital ecosystem. It has thus become necessary to connect to other environments.
Secondly, we also note that the pursuit of ambitious revenue targets by some market players is still not compatible with the quality needed to maintain the necessary good reputation with ISPs.
As for innovation, it will certainly come on the peripheral aspects of e-mail, such as the development of specific functionalities to adapt e-mail to mobility in a very simplified way for the advertiser.
But what seems to me the most important today is the positioning taken by some players for the creation of value around e-mail marketing, from the acquisition processes to the valorization of the collected data to produce highly relevant messages. What messages, data processing and scenarios will be the most effective while respecting the Internet user? There is a real challenge here, both on the provider's side
as an advertiser.
A last word to conclude?
We thank you for this opportunity to speak on Badsender, the opportunity for us to demonstrate that there will always be room for "Good Senders" and that some providers are still working in this direction.
Information and news: www.dolist.net
