Email marketing, a 21st century tool

Whilst email was first invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, its use as a marketing tool only took off from the end of the 1990s onwards. Harnessed for this purpose relatively late, email has now kick-started a real marketing revolution.
It is in this niche that the company Epsilon International excels. Founded forty years ago in the United States, it is the number one name in terms of on-demand technologies (Dream Mail), multi-channel email marketing services geared towards highlighting data. Its solutions allow clients to better understand the behaviour and expectations of message recipients, as well as to gauge, manage and optimise their return on investment. Clients can choose to use the technology internally (self service) or to entrust management to Epsilon International (full service), or else mix the two possibilities, when internal resources are not adequate.
“Email is the 21st century marketing channel. It has allowed us to transit from intuitive, imposed and intrusive marketing techniques to predictive and interactive marketing,” states Didier Gaultier, Managing Director of the French arm of Epsilon International. Present throughout the world with its 25 offices in 15 countries and 4 continents (America, Asia, Europe and Oceania), and indexed on the stock exchange, Epsilon International produced a significant consolidated turnover last year totalling 500 million dollars (360 million euros). Its performance can also be measured according to the success of its clients who, in 2008, achieved a turnover of 17 million euros per day thanks to the email channel alone. In all, the company managed to send 40 billion opt-in emails (sent with the previous consent of the recipient, editorial note) and enabled the carrying out of 220,000 e-commerce transactions per day. The company hosts in its databases over seven billion addresses.
In terms of organisation, Epsilon International is made up of four divisions.
Epsilon Digital provides useful technologies and services for carrying out email marketing; Epsilon Data/Abacus is in charge of data (sales and rental of files), hosting and integrating client relationship management systems; and Epsilon Purple is dedicated to the creation of web sites (only in the United States for the moment) and emails. A transversal fourth division backs up and services the three previous ones – Strategic Services.
In a market where a double technological and marketing competence is still rare, the savoir-faire of Epsilon International teams is recognised and allows it to stand out from its rivals, notably via a daily follow-up of its clients. “At the start, in very many companies in this sector, email marketing was separate from the marketing department and the person in charge of emails worked all alone,” recalls Frédéric Testard, Client Manager for Epsilon International. This double competence is indispensable as the email channel is the most risky one today. Apparently simple, it is often badly used. The spam phenomenon is a perfect illustration of the poor use of email, and according to Microsoft, such messages represent between 95 and 99% of emails sent!
A survey carried out by Jupiter Research, published at the start of last year, further reveals that only 10% of companies throughout the world use email correctly.
Meanwhile, Epsilon International does things differently. “The internaut is at the centre of our preoccupations, for email is a relational channel. This is why our clients appreciate us: we share our expertise with them by indicating what are the best practices to adopt and the potential of associated income,” explains Cyrille Aguinet, in charge of strategic analysis services at Epsilon International. A number of prestigious brands thus entrust their email marketing campaigns to this company, both off-line companies that also make online sales (such as Dell, France Loisirs, Sony, Tesco, Ubisoft) or companies devoted to online activities (including fruitrouge.com). There is no doubt that the survey published in June by Epsilon International on the behaviour of internauts in relation to email will be of interest to such companies…

Information on www.epsilon.com and epsilon-international.fr.