A Collaboration with Alpaco: Creating Cool Emails

Alpaco is on a mission to change the game of email marketing, fostering a collaborative, flexible approach that sets its platform apart from the rest. We sat down with its CEO and Founder, Fillip to discuss how the company started, its vision for the future, and plans for innovation in this ever-changing technical marketing landscape – check out our insightful conversation below!

What inspired you to start Alpaco, and what gap in the market does it aim to fill?

Alpaco started 10 years ago – my partner was working in marketing automation at an agency and I was an email developer. We had both found ourselves repeating the same processes in our projects, manually dragging and dropping blocks in and out of templates. Back then, email creation was very rudimentary. You had MailChimp and other smaller platforms doing drag and drop, but the tools were limited. One day we found ourselves working with a platform where we could create our own content management system. The code was nitty-gritty, but it was technically possible so we did it and it was a huge success. We knew we were onto something but it was only when COVID hit that we decided to give it a proper go. Going back to your question, the gap that we’ve been trying to fill is the distance between email professionals who do the technical stuff and those who manage the content.

How does Alpaco differentiate itself from other email marketing platforms?

Most email service providers are great at the data side of things but what they’ve been missing is that focus on the editorial process and content creation which is what makes us different. We are trying to build a tool that strikes the right balance between flexibility in code and design with enough control so nothing is left to chance for developers. It’s important that you can't mess with anything that developers wouldn't want you to mess with and that’s the tightrope we’re walking. So to sum it up, it's a tool for both the developers and the marketers. We’re platform agnostic and not tied to one email service provider (ESP). Let’s say an organisation starts in one ESP and then switches to another, our tool will stay the same which makes life easier.

Can you explain how Alpaco integrates with existing email service providers?

What we’ve created is a platform that doesn't specifically manage or touch your data, and for that reason, it's GDPR compliant in any organisation. We mimic the data and then the marketers can see how it looks. Upon export, all of the data fields are transformed into how they should be in the ESP. Basically, it's going to integrate like that and end up in your ESP's template folder. And that's how we integrate with ESPs. But I really want to stress the fact that we don't manage any sensitive data and we probably never will.

What role does collaboration play in Alpaco’s platform, and how does it enhance team workflows?

In email marketing, you’ve got the developers, the CRM managers and the marketers responsible for the content all trying to work on the same thing. Alpaco brings them into one platform where they can see everything from a unified view. It’s one single point of truth where teams and stakeholders can do things like review assets or leave comments. Rather than marketers having to become experts on a specific technical platform, we let them focus on curating content. From our experience, that is a huge help because not only does it save time but it also takes pressure off of the possibility that people switch jobs or have to adapt to new platforms. Giving people the tools they need to focus on what they’re best at is the core of our product.

How does Alpaco ensure that email campaigns remain on-brand for its clients?

That comes down to striking the right balance between flexibility and control. There are definitely similar systems to Alpaco out there that are really good at the control part or the content design, but they often don’t strike the balance between both. I think that’s what makes us different. We want to continue giving these professionals the right tools to manage their templates on their terms, with the right data integrations, iterations, calculations, and options. That’s how we help brands. One thing about our system is how easy it is to update your campaigns. There are so many systems where it's either impossible to do that or you can only build on top of what you already got which is an ongoing burden the further down the road you get. So for a professional, having that flexibility is a game changer.

Could you share some success stories or feedback from clients who have used Alpaco?

One client we’re really proud to work with is Pret A Manger. They have a fairly complex email design system and the nice thing is that they can keep iterating and building on top of it to make it more complex with ongoing versions. Pret needed something that wasn't a one-off project but something that could keep evolving and was tweakable as things change. There are multiple layers and opportunities there and we’ve helped them with the fact that they can now create, manage, and export complex emails in half the time that they used to. When you look at the global scale on which they work, it’s a huge win and a huge success story.

How do you ensure that Alpaco remains user-friendly while still offering advanced capabilities for experienced marketers?

Whenever we start talking about a new idea I’m always asking the question of how we can provide something simple yet complex. We want to provide that complexity that professionals need from our platform but make it simple enough that anyone can use it. Having a template language that developers understand is fundamental in that quest. Our branding is very bright but we want the platform that customers see daily to be minimalistic so the colours are calm and we also offer dark mode. We truly believe less is more so letting managers do what they need to do in as few clicks as possible is essential. If you need to create a campaign, you can pick your template and be on your way in two clicks – it’s as simple as that.

What challenges did you encounter while developing Alpaco, and how did you overcome them?

It's that balance again of simplicity versus complexity. It was really important that we got the email experts on board because we don’t want to cater to clients who need simple solutions – there are already plenty of those on the market. We want to cater to clients who need the complexity, but still want it to be simple to operate. We want to provide peace of mind that if your template is being managed and built in Alpaco then you can sleep sound at night knowing it does what you want it to do and nothing more. So striking that balance and also getting the experts on board was and is still a challenge that we are trying to overcome.

What future developments or features can users expect from Alpaco?

We feel like we’ve created a tool that's super flexible, quick, and easy for marketers to get into. What we want to focus on now is how to get all of that data and data sources that CRM managers need and enhance them. That’s something, let’s call it data capabilities that we have in the pipeline. Another thing that we want to focus on is managing larger teams with different brands or versions of a template. These complexities emerge in large corporations when you have lots of different teams so that’s a feature that we’re looking forward to building. We also want to create an AI feature or features that can work hand in hand with our platform to assist the user. I can't specifically tell you what that looks like just yet but we’ve been working on it extensively to ensure stability, and it's looking very promising.

How do you envision the future of email marketing, and what role will Alpaco play in it?

10 years ago, it dawned on me that the industry needed more flexibility and I think that need still applies today. When I see all of the emails that I get sent daily, it's clear that some marketers could benefit from the flexibility of dragging and dropping their content whilst staying on brand. With the numerous algorithm changes to social media channels. With the numerous algorithm changes to social media channels there are also channels beyond email marketing like social media that feel like they’ve lost their edge. It seems like a lot of companies are shifting their marketing budget back to focus on the controllable, which email marketing is. But they've grown to expect the flexibility of drag and drop so trying to bridge that gap is still very much an important thing for the email marketing industry going forward.

Curious about how you can adopt more innovation into your CRM? Get in touch today and let our team of experts inspire you!