Oxemis interview: "We educate our users to respect good practices

This week we welcome the emailing platform Oxemis. This interview will allow you to make an opinion on the services that Oxemis offers.

Feel free to give us your opinion on Oxemis in the comments.

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

The OxiMailing solution was created almost 10 years ago. At the beginning, we didn't have the idea of making it a product, we simply found the solutions of the time too expensive and unsuitable for companies like ours. So we developed OxiMailing and tailored it to our needs. We then realized that OxiMailing was suitable for us, but that it could also be used by others. This has been confirmed with increasing success for almost 10 years.

Our business model has continually evolved from a stand-alone software solution to a model that is still software-based, but is now coupled with a high-quality mailing platform and numerous online services.

What makes Oxemis unique? What distinguishes you from other players in this highly competitive market?

Our main strength is undoubtedly our quality of service and this as much by the technical aspect of our platform as by the human contact offered by our team. We are fortunate to have a quality, friendly and responsive support, which associated with the performance of the platform makes our customers feel supported and accompanied.

We also operate on the basis of a software coupled with a high quality sending platform. This allows us to combine the best of both worlds:

• The software client allows you to benefit from a very responsive and pleasant interface to use. It also ensures the confidentiality of the address files of our customers since we do not have access to them (this is extremely important for many of them, including very large accounts).
• Our online platform, in charge of sending messages and statistical follow-up, is seamlessly connected to the software (no settings required) and we allows us to provide our customers with excellent deliverability and constant follow-up.

Finally, we put the emphasis very early on the qualitative aspect of emailing. From the very first year of operation, we set up an innovative (for the time, at least!) responsible emailing charter. We are proactive in training our clients in good practices and legislation and do not hesitate to terminate a contract if a user wishes to break away from it.

We really focus on the quality of our platform, all our tools are focused on that and that's what we're known for.

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

Like all players in the field, we are interested in several developments that will impact (or are already impacting) our clients' campaigns.

The first development is the one everyone is talking about at the beginning of 2013: the push of mobile into reading tools. Emails are more and more read on smartphones, tablets, etc. This requires adapting the message (size, content...) to obtain an optimized display. In the future, we will propose an evolution of the software that specifically addresses this need.

The second evolution has been constant for several years: it is the reinforcement of the filtering measures taken by the providers to fight against spam. This is an issue that concerns us because we do not want messages sent by our customers (respecting the legislation and legitimate) to be blocked by these new filters.

As I mentioned, we have been working for a long time on "educating" our users so that they respect good emailing practices and legislation. For years, we have put in place tools that allow us to identify a client who would use a poor quality address file or who would prepare a "spam" type message, even before they send it. This allows us to benefit from an excellent reputation with almost all the ESPs and ISPs with whom we are in regular contact.

In addition to these measures, we are constantly improving the technical quality of our platform by adding the latest technologies for digital signature of messages, by implementing feedback loops (management of complaints raised by operators) etc.

What are the next evolutions of your platform?

Two important evolutions are planned for the next months in OxiMailing: 

• The first one concerns a constant demand from our customers for several years. It consists in making available a multilingual version of our platform. In the In the next few months, an English version of our solution should be available. Other languages will be available in the longer term.
• The second evolution is partly related to what we have just discussed: the messages that our customers produce must evolve, if only because of the mobile readers which require an adaptation of the message to the size of these screens. We are therefore developing a new message editor that will allow the creation of content which will adapt to the screens on which it is read (the famous "responsive" mode which all the world is talking).

This new editor will also go beyond mobile adaptation. It will make it easier for our users to create their messages and achieve a more professional look without the need to use creative studios, which are usually too expensive, or "templates" which are just templates, often complex to adapt.

Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?

We offer every new user 500 credits to test our solution. These credits are offered without commitment and are not sub-level credits that would work on a dedicated evaluation platform.

These are real credits that allow you to test all of our services for free. In return, we only accept to deliver these credits if the details provided by the user are verified.

Please note that we do not exploit these data, we only wish to make responsible the users who test our platform and who would be tempted to do anything... Once again, the quality of our platform takes precedence over any other consideration.

What do you get out of it? 

As you will have understood, this is not really a "freemium" mode but a free trial limited to 500 sent emails.

Like others, we could have offered "fake free" by proposing the OxiMailing software, for example, but without the associated online services... but we must admit that this greatly limits the interest!

That's why we consider our free trial offer a good compromise to prove that we have nothing to hide from our future customers while protecting our platform from potential abuse.

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

It is clear that for a market considered as "out of breath" in recent years, the emailing sector is not doing too badly, in France as elsewhere.

In recent years, a lot of changes have taken place. New solutions, of varying quality, have emerged and the historical players in the sector have evolved their offer. Others have simply disappeared because they were unable to adapt.

Today, we realize that this market has moved from a quantitative mode to a qualitative mode: the goal is no longer to send as many emails as possible but to perfectly target the recipients and the message. Fortunately for us, this has always been our main focus!

Whatever the case, emailing will have to continue to evolve in the future, integrating new readers and joining the power of social networks. Far from being opposed, these different media combine perfectly to achieve an effective communication, with an exceptional ROI.

A last word to conclude?

I would like to thank you for this interview and encourage you to continue your action on "BadSender". It is essential and complementary to our actions to encourage the actors of emailing in the right direction: that of quality and responsibility.

I also invite your readers to find us on our siteon our Facebook page and our Twitter account if they want to know more about our solution.