Looking back on the 8 years Ematic has been in business, and the thousands of lives we touched between employees, customers, investors, partners and vendors across our 9 markets in which we operate as well as the rest of the globe, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished but aware that our mission is far from complete. I think the biggest lesson learned is that innovation isn’t purely a technology phenomenon, and that to address a market as diverse as Southeast Asia, innovation needs to happen at every level of an organization to achieve the goals of the business and our customers.
Ematic has always advocated a distributed approach to marketing technology: focused, best of breed products will beat monolithic “all-in-one” initiatives every time. At some point as our business grew, and our offerings grew, we realized this same thinking needed to apply to our own business which has led to a fairly radical re-think about our positioning in the market.
Our mission has always been to deliver real results for marketers – whether through our own technology, through 3rd party partners, or through our knowhow and services. While we’re still best known for Email Marketing, our drive to deliver results has increasingly led us to new places in a quest to bring a more integrated approach to the entire scope of digital marketing.
We decided to heed our own advice, and re-imagine Ematic as not a single company, but an ecosystem where best of breed offerings can thrive and a unifying layer of business interfaces tie everything together to generate a whole that’s greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Today we have reorganized into Ematic Group, which sports an initial lineup of three brands and business units, separating our digital agency (Elixus), our technology business (Sub AI) and bringing back our flagship brand, Ematic Solutions as a Marketing Technology Consultancy. The combined effect of these three business units gives us both the strength and the flexibility to tackle the core challenges faced by marketers in markets across Southeast Asia.
The most fundamental challenge of building great digital experiences for consumers in Southeast Asia boils down to one key thing: diseconomies of scale. Let’s face it: the Americans have it good when it comes to tech because the unit costs of technology are exceedingly favorable when you have a large single market and high Customer Lifetime Values. That means in Southeast Asia we pay higher unit costs for technology and leverage that against a population with significantly lower spending power, and frequently that leaves marketers upside down on their digital marketing initiatives.
If we want to build better lives for consumers, employees and businesses in Southeast Asia (…and we do!), we must understand that core challenge in unit economics and address it at every turn. Those of you who know our killer app, Hi-iQ know that it has a singular purpose of eliminating wasteful spend in email marketing. Those of you who know Elixus know that they are an ROAS Machine focused on maximizing every dollar (Baht, Dong, Ringget, Peso, Rupiah too) spent.
In some ways though, I’m almost most excited about reintroducing the Ematic Solutions brand to the market as it is capable of delivering impact on our collective unit economics challenge in a way we’ve not been able to do before.
Ematic Solutions is a Buyer’s Agent – we help marketers ensure that you’re buying the best marketing technology at the best price with the fastest time-to-value and the maximum long-term return on investment. We have built a team who’s job is to scope the entire digital marketing landscape across the globe, evaluate the products in terms of price and quality, and identify which are most uniquely fit for our markets. We have now partnered with more than 50 marketing technology firms from around the globe and are adding more every day.
To illustrate the point, a few years ago Ematic Solutions was a pure MailChimp shop. We still love those guys, but our roster of partners today just for messaging includes Iterable, Campaign Monitor, Mailjet, MailGun, Klaviyo, OneSignal, Active Campaign, Insider, Moengage, Webengage, Messagebird, Twilio, Smartmessage and several more coming soon. We also offer services on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Campaign, Clevertap, Emarsys, DotDigital and Netcore.
Our quest to help marketers maximize their ROI requires Ematic to minimize our costs so you don’t pay “on top” of your tech. In many scenarios, we can deliver technology, implementation of the technology, local support and services all for less than if you simply bought the technology directly.
For those who want and need more help, we are also unveiling a whole range of services to help with a lot of the really “tough stuff” that many business struggle with. Let’s face it: operating a marketing team these days is getting more complex all the time, and often the need for specialization simply doesn’t align with the size of organization that makes sense for your business, and we want Ematic Solutions to be your swiss army knife to fill the gaps and ensure your entire ecosystem is running like a well-oiled machine.
The bottom line: Ematic Solutions isn’t beholden to any particular technology. We can help your business with any marketing technology, and with any challenges you are having with your marketing technology. Ematic Solutions is here to build you the growth stack of your dreams, catered to your needs and budget, and open up a world of flexibility to adapt to whatever changes may come.
It’s a very exciting time, and we are just getting started. Come join us on a journey to a better Southeast Asia.
