Paris-Based Startup Reelevant Offers Simplified Email Personalization

From Reelevant

It’s getting difficult to remember a time when “personalized” didn’t regularly accompany the phrase “email campaigns.”

But personalization can also be complicated.

Today, a Paris-based startup named Reelevant is releasing a public beta of a new cloud-based service that claims to simplify the dynamic delivery of an email at the right time and with the right content for each person’s conditions.

Targeted at small and medium-sized e-commerce companies, Reelevant allows the user to chose from several demographic, device or behavioral attributes covering different aspects of the email’s delivery and content, when setting up the campaign and email template.

A drop-down menu, for instance, allows the product photo in an email to be updated based on the local weather of the recipient.

So, for example, an email from a fashion e-commerce site would automatically substitute a product shot of snow boots for a previous image of casual shoes, if that email recipient’s local weather changes. Communications manager Delphine Moulu told me that the platform accesses worldwide weather data.

Similarly, the delivery of an email can be selected for a given day, and it will initially be delivered at a random time. After several deliveries on selected days and at random times, the platform learns which time more frequently leads to an email open by this recipient, so it can target future emails at that time for that person.

The idea of a highly simplified, in-context employment of user conditions to personalize email content and delivery is an attractive one, especially since other personalized email solutions are growing increasingly complex. KickDynamic, for instance, also attempts to address this need.

But Reelevant feels fairly thin in its current features, since there are only a handful of conditional parameters one can select, such as device or weather. And the platform can only use device or user data that it captures directly. There is no capability, for instance, to load user attributes that might have been previously acquired, although the platform does allow data export to another platform.

Vincent Martinet, Reelevant’s founder and CEO, previously ran an email marketing agency and led the creation of another email marketing platform, SimpleMail.