Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis (Part 5)

Sramana: Have you done any work in the U.S. yet?

Jocelyn Denis: We opened a U.S. subsidiary a year ago and I am very happy. We did our market research by opening a subsidiary. You have to test a market first before you can modify and return with adaptation.

Sramana: This U.S. is a much more competitive market. SMS marketing has gained a lot of traction in Asia, but culturally, SMS marketing has not been well received in the U.S.

Jocelyn Denis: We think our traction here will be our multichannel platform. A lot has changed over the past four years. Smartphones offer the most convergence in the digital area.

Sramana: When it comes to direct marketing platforms, you will find that the U.S. is an extremely crowded market. All of the email marketing providers here can handle it as well. Text message marketing has not been accepted in the U.S. very well.

Jocelyn Denis: We have found that to be true. After having discussions with our customers and retailers, we find that the main challenge is helping them increase their digital data. They compete against folks like Groupon, but in order to do that they need to collect their customers’ digital data. We have been developing solutions to help them collect that data.

The idea is that we offer the consumer some type of an advantage, such as a coupon. We can let customers scan QR codes from a newspaper, which leads them to a website. Once the user fills out the form, he or she has opted in to receive coupons from that retailer.

Sramana: We handle a lot of email marketing in our business. The opt-in process is a nightmare. The biggest problem we face is double opt-in. Email marketing providers in the U.S. require double marketing, and we lose a tremendous amount of leads because of this nonsense. These are our leads that we have collected from our events, and they won’t let us add them in without doing another confirmation.

Jocelyn Denis: With the QR code model, consumers are doing that for themselves.

Sramana: The problem is that it all goes into spam. Think about it from a consumer’s point of view. How many emails are coming into your email box? Confirmation emails get lost all the time. This is a huge problem. Our members who are paying us to become members of 1M/1M are in our system. We send them the opt-in invitation, and that invitation is lost. They cannot relocate it and we cannot reissue it for them for 30 days. These are paying members!

Jocelyn Denis: We are managing the opt-out automatically on all channels as well. Text messaging is very different, and it is more efficient than email. Companies can send spam email because it is free. There is no penalty for sending those messages. When it comes to text messaging, the sender is required to pay.

Sramana: Let’s look at that from the receiver’s end as well. If you sent me text messages to market your stuff, I would brand you as spam immediately. That is a psychological quirk in the U.S. We don’t tolerate it here. In Asia it is very much part of the culture. I am not willing to be marketed to using text messaging. I don’t do business on text messaging;it is just not a business channel. Yesterday a guy from Germany wanted to do an interview with me, and he kept sending me text messages. I told him to stop texting me and communicate with me via email. It is a cultural thing. In India and other parts of Asia, text messaging is a business communication channel.

Jocelyn Denis: It is clearly different in the U.S. They use email on smartphones much more than in Europe.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis
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