With these tools, Pepper.com (mydealz) has built the world's largest shopping community.

1. "The market is flooded with best-of-breed software"
2. Which CRM for nearly 1.5 billion visits?
3. Pepper.com's marketing tools of choice
4. These are the tools Pepper.com uses

Anyone who has ever searched online for bargains has almost certainly come across mydealz.de. The fact that the site is one of the big deal platforms in the country should therefore be well known. However, not everyone may be aware that behind it is Pepper.com, a holding company that operates regional spin-offs around the world and can boast over 25 million users. We therefore asked Chief Product Officer Médéric de Buyer what tools are used to communicate globally and what software is indispensable for Pepper.com's marketing.

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"The World’s Largest Shopping Community" is prominently on the company page of Pepper.com. Over 25 million users are said to generate over 500 million page views every month on portals like PromoDescuentos in Mexico, DesiDime in India, and mydealz in Germany. The holding company was founded in 2014 by Fabian Spielberger and Paul Nikkel. In the OMR podcast, Spielberger once referred to the group as the "Facebook of Shopping".

Chief Product Officer Médéric de Buyer told OMR in an interview which tools are essential for communication within a globally positioned company, why Pepper.com now uses a self-programmed newsletter solution and which software is used in social media marketing.

"The market is flooded with best-of-breed software"

Médéric de Buyer, CPO of Pepper.com

"I don't get the feeling that the market is lacking a particular software. It's virtually flooded with specialized, so-called best-of-breed software," says Médéric de Buyer to OMR. He is the Chief Product Officer at Pepper.com and has the best overview of which tools and software are used in the company. "On the one hand, this is not bad: The tools are getting better and after all, it is also getting easier to connect them," he says. However, the increasing fragmentation also has drawbacks. "We have to conclude contracts with many different suppliers. And this is usually more expensive overall. In the end, it doesn't make it any easier for our teams to understand when and why they should use which tool."

He also expects a consolidation in the tool market - which among other things, was recently indicated by the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce. Slack is also one of the tools, which in the event of short-term failures would probably have the greatest impact for Pepper.com. "Slack and Google Workspace are the most relevant communication and collaboration tools for us," says Médéric de Buyer. "Most of our internal communication takes place on Slack. And thanks to Slack Connect, some communication with external partners over shared channels as well."

Which CRM for nearly 1.5 billion visits?

Communication within and between teams around the world is of course important, but what software is behind the actual product, i.e. the various portals and apps of Pepper.com? They must certainly be stable. Just in Germany, France and the UK, Pepper.com generated 1.42 billion visits in 2020 - 52.9 percent of which were within the apps.

"We use Batch as the CRM platform for Android and iOS," explains Médéric de Buyer. “We can efficiently plan push notifications with it; the tool also supports automated logic for campaigns.” With Batch Pepper.com can also send millions of notifications at once. France as the company's headquarters is also an advantage. "This makes more sense for us in terms of data protection than many other tools that often come from Israel or the US," says de Buyer.

Pepper.com's marketing tools of choice

Such a huge amount of traffic doesn't land on Pepper.com's pages and apps by itself, of course. An important building block in the deal platform's marketing mix are emails. Médéric de Buyer says: "A few years ago, we started with Mailchimp then looked at which features we really needed and finally built an internal solution tailor-made for our uses." However, Pepper.com's CPO would not recommend this step to every company, as there are not only advantages. "In our case, the tool is extremely reliable and fits exactly what we need," explains de Buyer. "But it's not as flexible as third-party tools and our teams therefore have fewer options to experiment in some cases." However, Pepper.com still uses Mailchimp despite having their own newsletter solution - for instance, for certain B2B newsletter campaigns.

The various social media platforms should not be any less important for Pepper.com's marketing strategy. Here too, the teams rely on a few tools. "We use Gleam.io to conduct various types of contests that are intended to boost engagement and target audience growth," explains Médéric de Buyer. Contests created in this way can be easily integrated anywhere using the embed function. To be able to quickly and easily build corresponding landing pages at the same time, Pepper.com relies on InstaPage. "And to then also be able to measure the efficiency of such campaigns and allocate the traffic to various channels, we use UTM.io. This also ensures that our UTMs are consistent and thus our campaign attribution is reliable."

These are the tools Pepper.com uses

Here is a list of the software and all the tools used by Pepper.com: