eco – Association of the Internet Industry are delighted to welcome their new team member Sebastian Kluth, Technical Lead with the Certified Senders Alliance (CSA). In a brief interview, Sebastian gives us an insight into his background – and what this can contribute to the CSA.
Seb, you have just taken up the position of Technical Lead with the Certified Senders Alliance. Could you tell us something about what this role entails?
So, you’re right, I took over the role of Technical Lead at the beginning of September, which means I’m with the CSA for just going on a month now. And basically, my role entails responsibility for all technical services and tools, and dealing with questions concerning deliverability. It’s ultimately about improving email deliverability and serving our certified senders – so, for example, we have ESPs turning to us who might be struggling with GMX, Yahoo! etc. What we do is provide them in so far as possible with solutions and supports, through acting on the strength of our partnerships with mailbox providers.
But my main focus is to relaunch and reconfigure our CLIP tool – our customer management portal where customers can manage their contact details and IP addresses. In reconfiguring CLIP, we will be adding new modules, further developing reports and functionalities. This will include working closely with partners and with coders.
What do you find particularly exciting about working with the CSA?
In particular, what I find exciting is gaining a closer insight into the ecosystem of German providers. Due to my experience over the past years, I was working more with international systems, which means I am more familiar with the international set-up. I’m really interested in learning about the German ecosystem – in getting an insight into local dependencies and requirements for the German market. How, in particular, German mailbox providers interact with the market and interact together with ESPs and their direct customers.
What added value do you think your work might create for CSA members?
I hope that I can bring in a lot from my experience that I built up over the past few years. I’m coming from the deliverability space, where certification and email deliverability have been my core topics over the past five-and-a-half years. And I hope I can add a lot of possible new functionalities and new values and, indeed, new added value for the CSA products.
To go back a little more into my personal history: I’ve been in email marketing for roughly 15 years now and worked for different sites in email marketing – for example, agencies as well as for brands – so I can add this experience as well. And I also worked for two-and-a-half years for an ESP. So I think I can bring in the different perspectives that we need to be aware of as the CSA, in order to be the neutral level between deliverability issues or deliverability challenges between ESPs and mailbox providers. I hope I can add my perspective, my experience, and my knowledge to that, to improve and develop the CSA further. Because I firmly believe that this is an important topic that we cover here and it needs a body to define standards and to make sure that these standards are not just written on a piece of paper; that these high quality standards are becoming a real live, core topic – indeed, a no-brainer for all email marketers, ESPs, and mailbox providers.
