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Posted by on 1 April 2006
Digital communication by email, either one-to-one with business associates, or one-to-many through e-newsletters, is becoming more and more personalised,
effective and interactive. If you receive emails from companies like Direct Broking, Hell Pizza, iStart, Red Balloons or Snow Planet you have seen the start of a digital marketing
revolution: emails reflecting each of these companies’ brand value.
What you won’t see is the back-end tracking and intelligence that these types of emails can contain. Sending a HTML email is tricky at best, this is due to the combination of different
email programs with different capabilities–not to mention spam filters and firewalls.
For more on where this trend is headed and what’s possible, we spoke with Gael de Kerdanet, CEO of digital marketing solutions provider, Calcium Software.
iStart: Firstly Gael, who is Calcium Software and what do you do?
Gael de Kerdanet: Calcium is an NZ-made software company - our core strength is our ability to devise and deliver strategic marketing ‘power-tools’ all built upon our mailPrimer
platform. Our current suite of products will manage and deliver your daily emails (1-to-1) as well as your marketing emails (1-to-many) so that they are consistent with your brand and
company values while being optimised/customised for each recipient’s preferences and interests. Our platform takes digital marketing to the next level, allowing our customers to
fully understand their own customers’ habits and preferences, and leverage that knowledge by using our solution to automatically serve the relevant content. Think “one to one”, fully
personalised communication between companies and their customers...
iStart: Who is behind Calcium?
de Kerdanet: Calcium is a privately owned company, which was launched in June 2002 through a seed investment from local angel capital firm Sparkbox. We were supported by Wellington’s CreativeHQ business incubator after we merged with Wellington IT start-up Nexsysdev in 2004. We have since received our first round of VC funding last November from Investors Guaranty, an international private venture capital company.
iStart: How long have you been in operation?
de Kerdanet: We started in June 2002, but we really got going in 2004 upon releasing Version 2 of mailPrimer in March of that year
iStart: How quickly have you grown?
de Kerdanet: From 2004 to 2005 we grew by 300%, adding around 40 customers to our original
10. We are on track to grow by 360% for the whole of this 05/06 financial year, having picked-up another 110 customers.
iStart: What are Calcium’s products?
de Kerdanet: Our solutions include mailPrimer 1-2-1 - a powerful everyday/every email solution that centrally processes mail after it leaves Outlook (or any other email client). Each of
these email is “primed”, ensuring brand consistency and can include up-to-date, relevant content whilst allowing the lifecycle of that email to be monitored.
Another one of our solutions is our mail-Primer 1-2-many - a powerful email newsletter solution that offers 99.5% deliverability, surveys tools, multiple templates per campaign and campaign segmentation. We also offer Silhouette - a cutting-edge web intelligence and analytics solution. As our technologies are using industry standards, such as SQL, .Net, Java, etc, we integrate with most CRM packages, ensuring that our customers can store and act upon the data they are collecting on their own customers or potential customers.
iStart: How does the technology work?
de Kerdanet: mailPrimer is a rules engine that sits on top of a self-learning database. Every email is stripped down to bare-bones and passes through our four-step customization
process. The first two steps are about applying the sender’s brand values and content such as disclaimers, personal details including signatures and other messages. The second two steps are about customizing and focusing the email to the recipient’s preferences (which include the ability to receive html, images, links etc) and interests (based on the recipient’s prior interaction with email and web content). The result is each email message sent can be unique to each recipient – even if multiple recipients are cc’ed to one email.
We use the same engine for our 1-2-many “newsletter” tool, hence our 99.5% deliverability rate on a clean database. Both applications are available either as an ASP or a Server version. Silhouette is on the server side, tracking users’ behaviour through a mix of Java script and cookies. It integrates fully with mailPrimer allowing us to track end users from emails to web site and vice versa.
iStart: Where did the idea come from for these products, did you see a gap in the market?
de Kerdanet: Initially, from a very simple fact, backed-up with a survey of the Marketing Associations’ members two years ago: most companies spend 60-80% of their marketing budget
building their brands. Yet almost half of their daily interaction with prospects, customers and suppliers is email based – a totally bland medium until mailPrimer. From there we developed a suite of integrated tools offering IT managers the ability to pro-actively manage email communication.
Whilst also empowering marketers to leverage the hundreds of untapped communication opportunities that their companies sends every day.
iStart: Are the products unique?
de Kerdanet: mailPrimer 1-2-1 has only one competitor worldwide, whilst both mailPrimer 1-2-many and Imprint / Silhouette have many.
But together as an integrated solution, we currently have no match, whether in terms of benefits; functionality or value for money.
iStart: How many clients do you have on board?
de Kerdanet: Today, more than 150 and we send on average 30,000 primed emails a day. Almost any prospect we meet mentions that they have received at least one “primed” email in the last week - the red man [mailPrimer’s logo] is becoming ubiquitous!
iStart: Who are some of your key clients?
de Kerdanet: All our clients are key to us, just to name a few A J Park, Brebner, Hell Pizza, New Zealand Post, Profile Publishing and OneSource.
iStart: What are some of the key benefits they get from using your products?
de Kerdanet: Customers using our solutions are
able to:
iStart: Why has the uptake of mailPrimer been so rapid?
de Kerdanet: Because it fills a huge gap in our customer’s communications, while allowing them to easily increase their ROI by way of up/cross-selling. Actually, our biggest sales force is our own customers through word of mouth.
iStart: Have you got any new products currently in development?
de Kerdanet: We are finalising our turn-key offering - Hot-Prospect, which will merge all three applications into a very simple to use package.
We think it’s going to take digital marketing to the next level. We are already beta testing the product with our most advanced customers and are planning our first release in May. Actually,
the cool thing is that we already sold it to two customers – NZ Post and Profile Publishing!
iStart: What are the next steps for the company? de Kerdanet: Same as most Kiwi start-ups really aiming at making it big outside NZ. We therefore plan to start exporting directly to Australia and Europe to begin with, and are also working with our VC partner on a development that will take mailPrimer to a global market.
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