Graduated in Economics and Commerce, Dr. Lars Woessner is Managing Director of eCircle in Italy and France. Before this experience, he collaborated with the strategic consulting agency Roland Berger, where he gained specific expertise in planning turnaround interventions in the media and fast-moving consumer goods sectors for Italy, France, and Germany. Appointed head of business development projects for eCircle in 2000, since 2001 he has also been part of the executive committee.
How does the Italian advertising market present itself and what are its prospects?
The Italian advertising market in general, and online advertising in particular, is experiencing strong growth, thanks to the increased awareness of companies about the importance of the digital medium. In the past year, the percentage increase is 40%, and for some channels, it is even higher. Last year, online communication investments surpassed those for billboards and cinema, and the gap with radio investments has drastically narrowed. There are now companies that allocate a significant portion of their advertising budget to the Internet medium, aware that they can monitor its effectiveness and intervene in real time if needed, measuring returns with certainty.
What is the relationship between companies and this market?
Companies approach the Internet medium with curiosity and interest, but they often lack internal figures who fully understand its enormous potential, for example, in the field of e-commerce. The role of online advertising agencies like ours is therefore not only to manage effective targeted planning but also to suggest the best integration solutions, for example, between online and offline marketing activities.
What is eCircle’s vision?
eCircle positions itself as a reliable partner for the entire communication cycle with customers and potential clients: from “media” campaigns for launching a new product, to gathering purchasing decision users for the company newsletter, to relational marketing to better understand customers’ consumption habits, to selling products directly online, to integrating company databases to communicate effectively and coherently to their target. Its international dimension is a peculiarity that the main competitors present in the Italian market often cannot boast.
Who is your typical client?
Our target market consists of all those companies that have realized or are ready to realize that their presence on the digital medium should not be dictated by a simple market trend (we are here because our competitors are too), but rather connected to the actual added value of the medium. When you add the possibility of operating on specific targets, as email allows, the risk of investment dispersion is visibly reduced.
Who are your competitors?
eCircle has many and no competitors.
The digital market, in fact, poses few barriers to entry for new players, thus appearing crowded with a myriad of operators, more or less large and reliable, who operate on just one of the various aspects of digital communication, unlike eCircle, which, thanks to its solutions, intervenes in the entire digital communication process, from developing a strategy to measuring returns in terms of ROI.
What does eCircle offer more than the competitors present in Italy, and why should one choose you?
What we offer our clients comes from our daily experience. We are the first to experiment with new features since we have a database of several million registered users, collected over eight years of work. Obviously, our knowledge is not limited to the responses of our users but also more universally to the relational techniques involved between a company and its market, having been commissioned by over 400 companies in Europe to assist them in customer relationship activities with their clients and potential clients.
Therefore, we can periodically verify what works and what works less. In this sense, our international dimension certainly helps since we closely observe what happens in markets where we are present and where email marketing already constitutes an important lever in the marketing mix.
The use of an advanced platform like ours (eC-messenger) allows not only to track the entire journey of a user – from receiving the email to making an online purchase – immediately calculating the ROI of a campaign and “recovering” customers who have interrupted the purchase process; but also allows transforming the data collected from this monitoring into strategic information relevant for generating upselling and loyalty.
What are the sector’s novelties?
As we recently illustrated during a workshop on email marketing trends, based on what we can observe in the Northern European international markets where we are present and where the web has an even more strategic importance than currently perceived in Italy, we are confident that dialogue with one’s target will become increasingly important, moving from unidirectional communication, albeit targeted, to a more interactive one, where the offer will increasingly adapt to the demand based on what users themselves decide to disclose to the company contacting them.
How did the last year go, and what are your future goals?
Since its inception, eCircle has consistently maintained a strong growth trend, and this year the same tendency is confirmed, not only in Italy but also in all other countries where we operate.
We are contributing to the task force organized by IAB Italy to define rules and standards for email marketing in Italy, and we want to be present at the main industry events to engage with companies that may already know us but have not yet had the opportunity to fully understand how we work and what we can do for them.
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