Today we welcome Guillaume Lafond, founder of Powerspace, to our series of interviews with service providers. If you have an opinion on Powerspace's services, please let us know in the comments.
Interview:
Can you give us a brief history of Powerspace? When was the company founded, by whom, has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
I founded Powerspace in 2008, after 5 years of e-commerce and digital marketing experience in the advertising industry. In 2010, Cedric Sadai joined Powerspace as a partner to oversee product and technology development.
Since the beginning, we have kept a strong advertiser and ROI vision, with the number one objective of maximizing the quality and performance of campaigns.
In general, what services does Powerspace offer (not only emailing related services)?
Powerspace helps brands and advertisers recruit new customers through high-quality direct marketing. We offer acquisition solutions customized full-service with a focus on Quality, Volume, ROI and long-term vision. We also develop a number of proprietary technologies, such as database de-duplication and dynamic creatives, which we use for our customers' campaigns.
Among these services, which ones are related to emailing?
To recruit prospects and new customers for our advertisers, we broadcast their campaigns on two push channels, emailing and display. For the emailing channel, we do not have our own database but work with a powerful network of publishers with more than 250 databases, which we rent according to various financial models, mainly CPM or performance.
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How much of your business is dependent on emailing?
Email marketing represents nearly 80% of our activity and remains in strong growth thanks to a diversification of customers and the launch of the Spanish and Italian markets.
What makes Powerspace unique in your market?
I think it's really our positioning as online acquisition specialists, the expertise and proprietary technologies we develop, and our long-term vision with our clients. In terms of technology, we already have an email database deduplication solution, a dynamic email personalization technology based on demographic, geographic, contextual criteria... But it's really in the second half of 2013, when we launch our BigData platform, that we'll really make the difference thanks to an exceptional level of granularity in the reporting and targeting of our campaigns.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
- The mobile reading media will very quickly represent more than 50% of emailing campaigns openings. Even if we adapt the creations and landing pages, especially through responsive design, many products, services remain poorly adapted to a mobile use, affecting very strongly the ROI of campaigns. At the same time, Internet users are not used to easily registering, requesting training, or making a purchase on this type of medium. Given the ease of use of these mobile devices, there is a tremendous opportunity to increase campaign response rates.
- The quality and reactivity of prospecting databases. For years, the responsiveness of acquisition campaigns has been steadily decreasing. This is clearly due to the marketing over-pressure of advertisers and publishers themselves, the explosion of bulk and shared collection methods, and the (justified) tightening of webmail spam filters. However, I think that we have soon reached the low point and that the less serious players will disappear. On the other hand, we still have excellent performances on some preserved and updated databases, and I am convinced that a quality positioning both at the advertiser and publisher level will make the difference in the long run.
- The (real) targeting of campaigns. Even if we have been talking about sending "the right offer at the right time" for years, this is still not very much applied in acquisition emailing, or even not at all in performance emailing. There is a big gap in emailing compared to the technologies developed in the display industry. The purchase of data and multi-channel, associated with BigData and machine learning technologies should allow for truly effective behavioral and predictive targeting.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for innovation?
The French performance-based emailing market was and still is one of the largest in Europe. Many affiliate platforms have developed very strongly on this channel in France, more than in other countries. However, the market has suffered enormously from an abusive use of performance email over the last 5 years and I think we are close to "maturity" on the decline. What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow and I think there is only room for innovation and quality.
Let's keep in mind that email is still the number one activity on the internet, that there are more and more online buyers, that they buy more and more, and that the new mobile devices are a great opportunity to improve the user experience, and therefore the reactivity of campaigns and ROI.
A last word to conclude?
Beyond the best practices of the market, I believe that we must simply respect the end user and put ourselves in his place when receiving an advertising email.
