A Chat With Suzanna Chaplin, Founder And CEO, esbconnect, On The Future Of Acquisition And How Email Is The New Identity Layer

Tell us about esbconnect?

In simple terms, we help brands turn email into a performance channel for acquiring new customers, not just for retention.

Most brands think of email as a CRM tool, but we flip that on its head. Using our data from 17 million opted-in UK consumers, we make it possible for brands to reach completely new audiences in their inbox and beyond.

We do this by understanding your ideal customer through Inbox Intelligence – insight into real consumer behaviour based on what people are engaging with in their inbox. From there, we build high-performing lookalikes and make those audiences targetable across email, programmatic, social, and even direct mail.

Our superpower is scale and intelligence – we can reach one-in-three UK consumers directly in their inbox, while bringing a completely new, privacy-safe channel into the acquisition mix.

We’ve built four products around this:

MirrorMail – turns your best-performing CRM emails into acquisition campaigns that reach 17 million new consumers

Inbox Extend – connects your email audiences with social, programmatic and direct mail for true omnichannel targeting

Optivo – our latest addition to the suite enables brands to retarget anonymous website visitors by email, even before they reach the basket

Customer+ – grows your first-party subscriber base with high-intent, opted-in users ready to convert.

In short, we’re redefining what’s possible with email. We’re helping brands acquire customers more intelligently, using identity rather than cookies.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Back in 2014, email was murky. It feels weird to say it, as this doesn’t exist today, but you could buy consumer data on a CD-ROM. In fact, there were two options – buy the data yourself and hope it was okay, or use a provider and blindly pay them, with no transparency on results. Meanwhile, in an adjacent space, programmatic buying was in full swing, which made it easier and more transparent to buy data.

We built esbconnect as we knew email delivered a better return than display, but lacked the transparency and trust. So, we figured we would build a transparent buying platform for email, where people could see the results in real time and select the audiences they wanted to target. This was the Marketplace, and to this day, this is still our most popular product – powering our MirrorMail product.

However behind the scenes, we knew email’s real power was its ability to be an ID, so we have been eating all the cookies in sight for years, quietly waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up and realise it’s a genuine superpower. And now it has, and email fingerprinting now powers many of our scaling products, including Optivo, Ideo and Inbox Extend. All of these make it possible to identify a person online and tie their online identity to an email, enabling omnichannel journeys.

Tell us about your core product or service?

Broadly, it is using email to power acquisition. At our heart, we have an audience of 17m, and that is an audience we know deeply. We know their postal address, whether they have children or pets, and we see what they are doing in their inboxes – who they are clicking on and buying from. We call this data Inbox Intelligence.

Inbox Intelligence powers our ability to offer truly omnichannel journeys. A brand can suppress its current customers, and build a lookalike of its next best customers, targeting them in social, programmatic, postal and in their inbox.

Of our core two products, one is MirrorMail – the ability to use email like Meta to acquire new audiences – select your audience, upload an email creative, and we handle the delivery and optimisation, driving you leads and sales. The other is Optivo – it’s the step before cart abandonment, enabling you to retarget with an email the 90% who never reach the cart and leave your site, encouraging them to subscribe/purchase.

What most excites you about the adtech industry?

It is a cliché but it is AI – but really the ability for websites to become a very personal space for an individual, especially if you think down the line to how the metaverse and VR could play into it. But imagine, you get driven to a website and instead of it being a search box, it’s an avatar of your personal shopper – they remember what you bought before, what your preferences are and they have curated a personalised selection of products that you can virtually try them on and purchase. That excites me.

And what excites me more are the ways brands can move towards this by growing their CRM base. The more you can connect data back to an individual, the better your models and the more personalised the experience. By owning the email address, you can control that conversation and educate them on the value exchange of providing more data. First-party data is king and you should be focused on partners that can help you grow it.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

Education – it is easy to spend on Meta, on Google – nobody is going to fire you for doing that. But email isn’t thought of as an acquisition channel, so we continuously have to educate people about its value. Then, even when we do convince people, where do we sit? The CRM team? Or paid media? Or brand? Or performance?

What is your number-one piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Well… I’ve got a few. First, plan to fail. Second: your gut knows best in hiring and firing. If you think someone isn’t working out, make that decision quickly. Then, get a good accountant, as cashflow is king. And finally, know your weaknesses and hire for that.

What can we hope to see from esbconnect in the future?

Retargeting is going into its third wave and Optivo from esbconnect will be pivotal for that – when people think of retargeting site abandoners, they will think Optivo.