Interview with Congratulations! Interview: "Make email as effective and profitable a channel as search".

This week in our interview cycle of emailing providerswe welcome Congratulations!an agency specialized in conversion and conquest via email.

Can you give us a brief history of Congrats? When was the company founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?

Congratulations! was created in 2010 by three partners Brice Gazeau, Fabien Poujol and Pierre Coquard. After several years spent at Maximiles, the European leader in online loyalty, we had identified several issues in the email and e-commerce market that can be summarized in one word: conversion. Email is still the most profitable channel after search, but it is still very poorly used by merchants for conquest and conversion. Our project was therefore to launch a new agency that would be able to compete with search in terms of ROI and volume. The starting point was the creation of a network of quality publishers offering a large volume of email addresses (6.5 million exclusively in our agency: Cybercartes and Deezer in particular), with the implementation of a datamart capable of integrating millions of behavioral data to offer optimal scoring. Our first business model was to rent out our databases to advertisers. For the past year, Congratulations! has gone much further by offering dedicated campaigns with PRM (Prospect Relationship Management) plans for each advertiser.

In general, what services does Congrats offer (not just emailing services)?

Our strategy is clear: to make email a conquest channel as effective and profitable as search. When we meet e-commerce players, we offer them turnkey operations to recruit new customers. Thus, we develop all the actions around email marketing to accompany our customers: web event, dedicated emailing, newsletter, qualification, leads detection, email retargeting, PRM,...

Among these services, which ones are related to emailing?

Everything! Emailing is at the heart of our development strategy.

How much of your business is dependent on emailing?

100%

What makes Congrats unique in your market?

First of all, our business expertise with more than ten years of experience in emailing and in managing campaigns for e-merchants. Then, our ability to integrate the problems of our customers to deliver an emailing operation adapted to their model and their objectives.

Do you think that affiliate marketing has contributed to driving down the price and quality of email marketing?

The responsibility is to be shared between publishers and advertisers. Affiliation has only taken advantage of a system by bringing millions of poorly qualified emails to advertisers who are educated to click and transform. It is important to understand that the market has become extremely professionalized in the last 5 years. At the end of the day, the platforms have shot themselves in the foot because for several years the email market does not go through them anymore.

What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?

1.  Integrate email into Big Data projects to deploy ever more effective conquest and loyalty actions (retargeting in particular)
2. Responding to the new web-to-store-to-web market by offering quality collection tools and databases
3. Offer increasingly affinity-based bases with turnkey models: "sending > retargeting > collection > PRM > conversion > CRM".

What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for innovation?

The French email market is complex and has become much denser in recent years with more and more players. In order to innovate and continue to develop, emailing must keep up with the issues of e-commerce and Big Data. Email remains and will continue to be a privileged communication channel between a brand and its customer in view of its turnover/cost ratio. It is up to us to make it evolve according to the needs of tomorrow's consumers.

A last word to conclude?

Long life to Badsender!