In our cycle of interviews with emailing providersToday, we welcome the Express Mailing platform. Feel free to give your opinion in the comments.
Interview:
Can you give us a brief history of Express Mailing? When was the company founded and by whom?
It is necessary to have that Express-Mailing is a brand of Axalone France registered at the INPI.
Axalone was created in May 2002 by two partners (Mr. BOVE, our manager and marketing director of Express-Mailing, and Mr. KEIL, our financial director).
However, Express-Mailing existed even before the creation of Axalone! Indeed, Mr. BOVE started to develop the Express-Mailing platform on a personal server 2 years before the creation of Axalone. The domain name Express-Mailing.com was registered in 2001 just before the official creation of the company.
Has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
No, because Axalone's business model was revolutionary for its time. At the end of the 90's and beginning of 2000, France had a few big marketing behemoths, but none of the websites of these service providers displayed prices; the consumer was therefore forced to contact the sales department by phone and sign contracts committing him for one or two years according to very variable monthly prices and let's say it "a little bit at the customer's discretion".
Mr. BOVE therefore decided, as soon as Express-Mailing was launched, to clearly display the prices on our site and to package the services in the form of "Tickets". This non-contractual and affordable ticket model quickly won over our customers and became our flagship product (90% of our sales, whether by email, fax or SMS).
The only small change is that for the past 2 years, we have been organizing private sales every Friday that allow our customers to benefit from discounts of up to -70% compared to our public prices.
Delighted, enchanted and even addicted our customers love it. These private sales allow us to do a little "low cost" while controlling our costs and sales.
Economic control is a strong point at Axalone and we prefer to say to our customers "we will still be here in 10 years" rather than kill our model in a few years.
Generally speaking, what services does Express Mailing offer (and not just those related to emailing)?
Emailing of course, which is the medium on which we are gaining the most market share year after year;
Mailing-fax - 2nd largest activity in terms of turnover - where Axalone is positioned as one of the 3 or 4 largest routers in France;
The fax-to-mail which allows the reception of fax by email with our innovation the anti-spam fax (which benefited from a research tax credit)
The mailing-sms appeared in 2006;
The voice-mailing or sms-audio, which allows to broadcast an advertising spot or a voice announcement on fixed or cell phones;
And finally a whole range of tools such as :
- mail-to-fax
- our Express-Fax Desktop software for sending single faxes
- a tool for sending and receiving faxes in POP3/SMTP
- APIs to connect to our fax/sms/audio/data servers from any CRM or website
- an SMTP directly linked to our emailing platform
- a data warehouse (Big Data) to extract emails/faxes/sms/phone numbers from a database of over 3 million companies (B2B)
- as well as the development of custom tools and dedicated interfaces for our customers
Among these services, which ones are related to emailing?
Our emailing platform is of course our main showcase for email marketing.
But our SMTP module developed in 2012 is already attracting about 30 customers who want to send email directly from their CRM or website without using an ASP or software interface.
How much of your business is dependent on emailing?
Emailing represents about 60-65% of our revenue.
2 developers work there full time and spend a lot of time on the daily improvement of the deliverability.
We also have a data entry operator who handles all Captcha and processes important NPAI (company change, retirement, company merger, sick leave or maternity leave, etc.).
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
Of course, robots developed by Axalone, process millions of NPAI automatically, to simplify the life of our employees and our customers!
What makes Express-Mailing unique in your market?
Our customers like Express-Mailing for its technical and commercial simplicity.
Our customer extranet includes dozens of automatic - but invisible - procedures that make our platform accessible to people new to emailing.
It includes email and domain name parsing, automatic deduplication, a subscriber search engine, subscriber list classification, low-level statistics, embedded images, open and link tracking, automated unsubscribe management and feedback loops.
Express-Mailing also has a code optimizer that allows you to reformat the HTML so that the emails are compatible on a majority of messengers (removal of HTML5, embedding of CSS, repositioning of objects, correction of links, optimization of code and images).
We also offer a storage space of 4 Megabytes per emailing to embed images and attachments in the email body.
What is the specificity of the B2B emailing market?
Most of our clients communicate effectively in B2B (i.e. to other professionals), but year after year we see our client portfolio growing with large groups or institutions working in B2C.
The advantage of B2B is the deliverability; The domain names to which we send, are made up of thousands of different names, unlike B2C whose bases are made up of 90% of Wanadoo/Hotmail/Gmail/SFR-Neuf addresses. The deliverability is therefore better. But be careful, this does not prevent us from having a very good deliverability in B2C!
Its disadvantage is its volatility; it is estimated that a professional email address lasts about 6 months. Company mergers, transfers, layoffs and retirements are commonplace. A B2B database is therefore quickly depleted. But our robots are able to detect the slightest change and pass on the information to our technicians.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
We are currently developing modules that are already found in other large providers such as :
- SpamAssassin scanning of the email before sending
- preview (screen shot) under various messengers (pc/mac/webmail)
- deliverability tests on a representative sample of messaging systems (Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Wanadoo, Free, SFR, Gmail, etc.)
Nothing very innovative you will tell me, but like all our platform, we make its developments in-house to never be linked to any provider. Our competitors use and abuse an American provider specialized in these deliverability tests.
It obviously takes longer to reinvent the wheel, but this wheel will be ours and we will master it.
The second challenge that we have been working on since late 2012 is the internationalization of our platform. After timid developments in Morocco and Hungary, we have just invested heavily this year in our development in Poland.
Finally, the integration of social networks is in the final stages of development and should be available to our customers by the second half of 2013.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for innovation?
Mature but not stable! Sorry for the Norman response, but after 12 years in business, we see newbies trying their luck every day and other companies closing just as quickly.
I'm taking this opportunity to make a little complaint, because with my colleagues we discover every month new "very very low cost" emailing offers. But these offers do not hold the road and come to "pollute / dilute" the prices of serious providers. Most of the newcomers are in fact only white labels or resellers of foreign emailing modules (United States, Morocco, Emirates, Hong Kong). Some customers have tried to launch a few campaigns via these new operators "where everything is practically free" ... but all have returned to Express-Mailing after catastrophic trials. Don't be fooled, when it's cheap, it's rarely serious!
As a simple example, we recently tested a French platform with prices divided by 10 compared to ours! Only the European headquarters of this platform was in England with a bank account in Hong Kong and developments in the United States and India ... in the end, the very day of this interview their website was down!
Only about fifteen French routers can boast of having their own infrastructure and being able to offer a good quality/deliverability/price ratio.
A last word to conclude?
More than just routing, we offer a complete and high quality service, and our customers are grateful for this!
