This week we welcome the emailing platform ContactLab in our interview cycle!
It is Arianna GalanteGeneral Manager of ContactLab France, who answers our questions.
Can you give us a brief history of ContactLab? When was the platform founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
ContactLab was born as a web agency in 1998 in Milan, Italy. This year we are celebrating our 15th anniversary! At that time the company was called Tomato Interactive. In 2011, our founder and CEO, Massimo Fubini, passionate about the web and especially about technology, faced with the growing potential of email marketing, had the intuition to start developing an email routing platform in-house. The platform, called ContactLab, quickly became the market leader in Italy, and Tomato focused on email marketing, taking the name of its software in 2010.
ContactLab is now the undisputed market leader in Italy and an increasingly European player, with an increasingly international team and customer base, branches in France and Germany and a presence also in Spain and England.
The business model has evolved over time with the addition of new services.
In 2008 we started building an in-house agency with the objective of supporting clients in managing their campaigns, from strategy to execution to data analysis. Later we also added a team of statisticians and analysts to manage business intelligence projects, using the results of the analysis to help our clients optimize their email marketing strategies.
We have self-service customers, who use the platform in total autonomy, full-service customers, who work with complete teams of account managers, html developers, copywriters, DAs but also technical project managers, programmers and analysts, and customers who benefit from our à la carte services. Contactlab's objective is to be the email marketing expert, able to meet all our clients' expectations.
What makes ContactLab unique? What distinguishes you from other players in this highly competitive market?
What makes us unique is the scope of our services. We bring a truly strategic approach to our clients' email marketing, CRM and communication programs and we are able to accompany them every step of the way. We believe in the role of email as a bridge to all brand initiatives so we also offer other activities around email marketing, such as surveys, mini-sites, contests, and social media initiatives.
With such a wide range of services, we are a true partner for our customers, who find the answer to a wide variety of technical, practical, analytical and strategic needs in a single supplier.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
The 3 biggest challenges for advertisers right now are:
- Organizing email marketing efforts: Email marketing has proven itself and advertisers are almost unanimous in their desire to use it more and better, by diversifying messages, by having an approach that is not only tactical but also strategic, all while guaranteeing a rapid time to market. It is in this logic that many companies that until now managed their campaigns internally are starting to ask for support from email marketing specialists. It is not necessarily a question of outsourcing everything, but more and more of being accompanied in the validation of certain choices or in the identification of new communication paths.
- Data analysis and use: Faced with a huge amount of data to understand, process and analyze, it is sometimes difficult for advertisers to rationalize the information, reach conclusions and develop action plans accordingly. They are however aware that data is a key element in optimizing email marketing campaigns and maximizing ROI. The challenge is to invest in this aspect, internally or externally, in order to have a better knowledge of their customers, prospects, buying habits, sales levers in order to personalize the dialogue with each contact and thus increase the revenue generated by email marketing.
- True customization of communication cycles: There is a lot of talk about personalization, but too many campaigns are still managed in a "spray & pray" mode, one message to the entire database, without taking into account the people we are addressing. Today, we are able to build real personalized communication paths for our contacts, whether they are new, loyal buyers, inactive customers, etc., paths that generally obtain excellent results. The challenge is to implement these programs, step by step, by analyzing data, developing hypotheses, testing options and observing the results.
What are the next evolutions of your platform?
The main evolution underway on the platform is around data visualization.
Our standard reporting section is already very rich and our business intelligence team works in parallel on the data to customize it to the needs of each client.
Precisely because we believe in the immense richness of numbers, the next step is a deepening of our approach of "visual intelligence" or "discovering through visualization", an in-depth work on the presentation of data in order to facilitate their understanding but especially to discover trends or correlations. We will be able to say more in a few months!
Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
No, we are not proposing it.
Why not use this model?
Since we believe in services and support for our customers, a "Freemium" model would not correspond to our positioning. We offer a free tool, but it is a different type of service: a powerful competitive intelligence platform developed in-house, newslettermonitor.comwhich I invite you to discover.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
The email marketing market is not yet mature, there are certainly still many new challenges to face, but above all many email marketing best practices are far from being applied everywhere. France is more technologically advanced than other Southern European markets but there is room for a more qualitative email marketing, more respectful of the final consumer, and which really offers him value.
A last word to conclude?
I can only conclude with the email marketer's mantra, relevance: the right message, to the right person, at the right time. If you respect this very simple rule, you are on the right track.
Happy email marketing in 2013!
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