esbconnect’s Ross Lafayette on bridging the online-offline gap with email

esbconnect’s recently appointed Sales and Partnerships Director Ross Lafayette describes how addressable offline-to-online ID graphs will drive email acquisition targeting in 2024.

Can you tell us about your journey in the advertising space? 

My first foray into digital media was when I joined the Independent & Evening Standard back in 2011, as a digital ad manager. Moved from traditional digital ads to Adtech at Flashtalking – an Independent ad server, in the summer of 2019. It was great because my role was 100% new business, selling directly to clients and agency holding groups. The product involved primary ad serving, creative personalisation, identity management, advanced analytics and verification.

After that, I joined Branch.io – a leading MMP, where I focused on mobile app marketing specifically deep linking and attribution. I then came to esbconnect as their Sales and Partnerships Director in October this year.

What attracted you to esbconnect?

I felt the opportunity I saw here played to my strengths and experience in the attribution data and cookieless solutions I’d worked on in my previous roles. What was even more exciting to me was applying my knowledge and skills in a new vertical – CRM/inbox data. Plus, most importantly, I believe in the product, and I can see the enormous potential here for customers.

Through email, customers have a consistent deterministic ID that we can deliver at scale. As customers look to become more sophisticated in their marketing tactics, email is becoming a huge part of that.

This year is the big year when Google finally switches off third-party cookies in Chrome, and on the face of it that reduces marketers’ ability to adopt data-driven approaches and deliver performance in the way they once did. 

But we see an email address as a passport to the internet, allowing brands to reach a user online, knowing it ties back to an individual, not a cookie or device. Email is becoming a central ID that can be harnessed across online and offline channels, which makes it incredibly valuable to multichannel marketing today. esbconnect presented an incredible opportunity to be part of the email marketing revolution as the company scales up. 

What does your role look like on a day-to-day basis? What are your responsibilities?

The overarching theme of my role is understanding customers’ challenges, pains, wants and needs. Ideally, if schedules allow, I get to talk to customers directly, to have that conversation and also to understand their current tech stack and marketing channels. 

However, I also work with partners in our ecosystem, such as Ometria, to help deliver the best service possible to our customers and ultimately be their business partners. 

Another aspect of my role is education. Businesses often have vast amounts of data, including crucial first-party data, that they don’t always know how to use. In fact, quite a number of customers can only activate around 20% of their data.

So we help them think about how to deploy and derive meaningful insight from that data. If we can increase the level of activation by another 20% through email, our customers then have the best chance of gaining repeat purchases or taking other actions, such as subscribing to a newsletter, joining a loyalty programme and so on. 

esbconnect recently launched a new product, Inbox Extend. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

This is all about the deterministic ID I mentioned before. Alongside unique behaviours of the email inbox, the platform helps us create deterministic omnichannel marketing, extending inbox intelligence to other channels. 

Through Inbox Extend, our customers can pick from 400+ proprietary audience segments, retarget email engagers with paid social, increase match rates in current audience segments, and build custom audiences and lookalikes from their CRMs and email campaigns. 

And this isn’t limited to digital channels; it also works with postal and OOH channels. Inbox Extend is the first addressable offline-to-online ID graph for acquisition targeting. This means companies can extend their reach from direct mail to email, social and programmatic media, reaching 16 million households – or 17 million consumers.

Overall, Inbox Extend means you can make your best-performing data segments work even harder for your business or help improve the usefulness of data from consumers who haven’t yet converted. 

This sounds really innovative, but do consumer privacy laws present any kind of challenge?

We know that consumers are more concerned about digital privacy than ever before. Performance marketing firm Tinuiti found that 55% of customers feel private companies should be doing more to protect their privacy online. Our proprietary database of UK consumers is fully GDPR-compliant (arguably a gold standard of data protection worldwide). The esbconnect team rigorously cleans and verifies the data, making sure it’s all double opted-in and overlaid with rich data on demographics and behaviours. 

So, what does the future hold for esbconnect and the industry?

Aside from growing the business, which will naturally keep me very busy, I’m also looking forward to helping the team develop new industry benchmark data and sharing those insights with other industry folks – especially as Inbox Extend can show us new data on acquisition from offline to online channels. Email is set to be a huge part of the marketing mix over the next couple of years – with 4.5 billion users predicted by 2025 – and I’m excited to be a part of it.The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.

Also published in: Mobile Marketing Magazine