Today, our Thursday interview is dedicated to a brand new platform, Emailing.com, which wants to be the marketplace for emailing professionals. Meeting with Yassine Hamou Tahraco-founder of Emailing.com
Can you describe in a few words the concept of Emailing.com?
Emaiing.com is the first marketplace dedicated to email marketing.
We put advertisers in touch with emailing professionals: file owners, routing solution editors, experts or independent freelancers, etc. After defining his needs, the advertiser obtains a price estimate. He validates his request and then receives several proposals adapted to his needs and at a fair price.
The objective is to help advertisers save time in finding providers or files that are truly adapted to their needs. For email marketing professionals, Emailing.com is a new acquisition channel, a channel that allows to attract qualified prospects and adapted to its offer.
Can you explain where the idea of creating an emailing marketplace came from? What makes you think there is a need for it?
The Emailing.com project was initiated by the Nextstars lab, a startup gas pedal. In early summer 2012, Nextstars brought together several email marketing experts to analyze advertiser need and positioning opportunities. Their work highlighted the opacity of the market for advertisers, among other things.
Many of the advertisers we interviewed mentioned significant price differences and difficulties in evaluating the quality of offers, particularly in terms of file rental. In addition, many of the service providers we met raised the issue of prospect qualification. Qualification takes time, often to realize that the prospect does not have a sufficient budget.
It is following this study that it was decided to position Emailing.com as a marketplace.
What is the team's experience with emailing?
The Emailing.com project was initiated by several email marketing specialists. These people, who have worked at players such as Come & Stay or France Abonnement, are now part of the "Strategic Committee" of Emailing.com.
As for me, I joined the Emailing.com project after a first experience in web software publishing. Of course, I had already used email in my previous web projects, whether in loyalty or acquisition, but I am especially lucky to be able to rely on the business expertise of our strategic committee.
While email marketing is already under a lot of pressure, isn't there a risk that an initiative like Emailing.com will push prices and quality even lower?
This is a very interesting question. By putting service providers in direct competition, Emailing.com can indeed indirectly encourage a decrease in prices. Nevertheless, we have made the strong choice to place quality at the heart of the qualification of requests. We are working on various educational and technical devices to explain to advertisers the interest of renting a targeted file and working with providers recognized for the quality of their services. By promoting the quality of files and services, Emailing.com can help some professionals to maintain their margin level.
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
Moreover, an initiative like Emailing.com is intended to facilitate the entry of new advertisers into the email acquisition market. Today, email acquisition remains a channel mainly used by experienced advertisers. By facilitating access to files and services, Emailing.com can attract advertisers previously lost in the vast universe of data marketing.
What are the different categories of emailing actors that could be interested in a presence on Emailing.com?
We want to give advertisers access to all email marketing providers. This includes file owners, data marketing service providers (cleaning, enrichment, etc.), routing software publishers and even independent experts or freelancers. For the moment, we focus on three main segments: file rental, routing and email design.
For email marketing professionals, Emailing.com is a great acquisition channel. The provider receives qualified requests for quotes, adapted to his positioning, and he optimizes his acquisition cost. Each contact is invoiced according to the prospect's budget.
Can you tell us a bit more about the platform? What features will be available at launch and what are the development plans for the future?
We have just opened Emailing.com in test phase. The main objective of this phase is to improve the qualification and tracking of requests for quotes made on the platform. It is in this objective of continuous improvement that we have established partnerships with a dozen players in the email marketing industry, in particular agencies such as Click and Site and routers like EmailStrategy or GraphicMail.
The main feature of the current site is the counting module. Before making a quote request, the advertiser obtains an estimate of the volume of contacts available and the budget to be planned according to the target he has chosen. For the other categories of services, the qualification of the requests is done through a form.
The public launch of Emailing.com should take place in June. The qualification process will be improved and refined thanks to the feedback from the test phase. For most of the services, the advertiser will have the possibility to get an estimate of the budget before requesting a quote. The test phase will also allow us to improve the matching between advertisers and providers.
Email marketing professionals will be able to define in detail their service offers in order to receive automatically by email requests perfectly adapted to their positioning.
A last word to conclude?
Thank you Jonathan for giving us the opportunity to present Emailing.com.
I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that Emailing.com is in a test phase. We need a maximum of feedback to improve the platform, especially the qualification process of requests.
Feel free to contact us to suggest improvements or simply tell us what you think of the project.
