As the first email marketing agency in Romania, White Image has seen impressive growth since its inception, shaping the local digital communication landscape. In this insightful interview, Andrei Georgescu, co-founder of White Image, shares the story of how the company started, its journey to becoming a market leader, and the trends that are shaping the future of email marketing.

White Image began as a passion project sparked by the then-emerging concept of email marketing. In the early 2000s, as email was just gaining traction in Romania, Andrei Georgescu and his co-founders faced significant challenges in convincing marketers of its potential. Fast-forward to today, and White Image is a leader in the industry, known for its highly customized solutions and innovative use of data.

Georgescu attributes the company’s success to its early entry into the market, the expertise of its stable team, and a constant focus on customization. "What sets us apart is the high level of technical customization we offer. Our solutions go beyond generic platforms, allowing clients to tailor every functionality to their specific needs,” he says.

As businesses increasingly demand automation and personalization, White Image has evolved to meet these needs by integrating data from multiple sources to create hyper-personalized messages. Georgescu notes that the next frontier lies in leveraging AI and machine learning, although he believes these technologies are still in their exploratory phase in creative spaces.

Looking ahead, White Image is focused on expanding its CRM services and helping clients navigate the complexities of modern data integration. With automation and real-time personalization becoming central to their strategy, the company is well-positioned to continue leading Romania’s email marketing industry into the future.

Read the complete interview below:

Can you tell us the story behind White Image? What inspired you and your co-founders to start the company, and what was the initial vision?

Andrei Georgescu: In the early days, White Image was more connected to the broader field of communication. One of the founders had just completed a master's in Communication and Advertising and was very eager to work in this area. However, at that time, advertising employers often asked for experience or personal projects in communication. In a conversation with someone who later became a partner at White Image, the idea of email marketing came up. Around that time, the first version of Seth Godin's Permission Marketing had just been released, and the first email marketing agencies were emerging in the U.S. It seemed like a new trend that created the challenge of launching it in Romania.

It was a time when most people were just getting used to using computers as everyday work tools, and email was still in its early stages. It was quite challenging to explain to marketers back then why we should send emails on their behalf. We often received responses like, "We have Outlook, why should we use your services?" It started more as a bet driven by the desire to create a personal marketing experience that would help us grow in our desired advertising careers. Over time, our passion for communication and the challenges of convincing potential clients of new opportunities turned into a passion for developing this business, which has continued to evolve with new communication challenges from the very beginning.

White Image has become a leader in the email marketing space in Romania. What do you believe has contributed to the company’s success, and which were the main challenges you faced on the way?

Andrei Georgescu: We became leaders largely because we were the first in this industry in Romania. It took several years before any local competitors appeared. For a long time, the barriers to entry in this industry were quite high, as it involved a significant technical aspect, which was a challenge at the time. However, as the IT sector developed, the technical barriers diminished, and what set us apart was our experience. We are proud to have a stable team with many years of expertise, which has resulted in corporate clients who have been working with us for over 10-15 years.

What differentiates us from any local or international competitor today is the high level of technical customization we offer. White Image integrates custom data solutions, builds specific functionalities for individual companies, and develops customized reports. For instance, unlike platforms like HubSpot, where you can't modify anything, our solution not only offers more functionalities but all of them can also be customized.

Who are your primary target markets or client segments? How has your approach to serving them evolved over the years, and what key industries or sectors do you see growing in importance?

Andrei Georgescu: Our solutions aren't limited to a specific client segment - we serve clients from any industry, whether they are large corporations with high security and functionality requirements or from the e-commerce sector. That said, we have a significant number of clients from the financial, banking, automotive, and industrial sectors, as well as from e-commerce.

The common factor across all industries today is automation. Most of our current work revolves around automation implementations and customizations. In addition to automation, data integration is critical - how we gather and use data from multiple sources to understand clients better and create relevant messages. With the right data, we can leverage dynamic content to personalize messages. For example, we can transform a single email template into dozens of personalized versions based on available variables for each client.

We also extend beyond online communication when necessary. For some clients, we have provided logistical support for events, such as organizing one with over 1,000 attendees. While our core focus remains on personal data management and direct communication through email marketing and automation, we have the infrastructure to support offline initiatives as well.

Email marketing has undergone significant changes with the rise of automation, personalization, and data privacy regulations like GDPR. How has White Image adapted to these changes, and what new trends or strategies are shaping the future of your business?

Andrei Georgescu: We have adapted to GDPR by certifying under ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 (which involves implementing a Privacy Information Management System) to ensure data security and privacy management. We also anticipate future trends, such as the rise of AI and increased interactivity in emails.

Automation and personalization aren’t necessarily new concepts—they’ve simply become more popular and recognized as valuable tools for driving business impact, whether through sales or improving customer relationships. However, both automation and personalization rely heavily on how much data is integrated into the system. In e-commerce, for example, automation is often based on user interaction with the website, but if that behavior isn't correlated with demographic data, it can lead to incorrect, impersonal messages.

The main challenge in e-commerce today is collecting “zero-party” data—information directly provided by customers to create more relevant communication. For e-commerce clients, key automation areas include recovering abandoned carts, welcome programs, and abandoned browse automation.

In other sectors, companies often have more demographic and behavioral data available. However, the challenge is integrating these data into systems that can communicate effectively. For most industries, automation is focused on after-sales services, product-related updates, or insurance notifications. The real challenge lies in collecting relevant data to identify key moments for automation and crafting meaningful messages.

In the personalization area, AMP technology can create many opportunities for the businesses that will adopt it. This allows the personalization of the message in real-time, for example when a user opens the email related to the abandoned basket, the user can see the new price of the product that was updated an hour before he opens the email.

Could you give us a glimpse into White Image's development plans for the next few years? Are there any new services, technologies, or markets you're focusing on to drive growth?

Andrei Georgescu: Our focus is on data integration. We're promoting our CRM services and solutions, which help consolidate customer interactions with a brand. This is crucial for creating business relevance and executing more marketing automation and personalized messaging.

In terms of innovation, what role do you believe AI and machine learning will play in the future of email marketing, and how is White Image preparing to integrate these technologies?

Andrei Georgescu: AI has been used in email marketing for many years, particularly in product recommendation systems tailored to individual customer needs. In the creative space, AI is still a newer player, and while it can be helpful, we believe it’s still in the exploratory phase and shouldn’t be left unsupervised. AI is great for data processing, but the current hype feels somewhat inflated. Technologies like Waze or Google Maps, which have been around for a while, are much more established examples of AI that are truly useful.

How do you see consumer behavior changing when it comes to email engagement, and what strategies do you think will be most important for brands to adopt in order to stay competitive in email marketing?

Andrei Georgescu: User behavior is directly tied to their interest in the email content. As marketers, our job is to find what each user is interested in and communicate those specific aspects to them. This means focusing on hyper-segmentation and hyper-personalization, creating content that speaks to each individual as granularly as possible.

Additionally, making the interaction as easy as possible is key. Technology like AMP allows us to make emails more interactive - for example, embedding a loan simulator within an email to simplify the purchasing decision. To achieve this, brands need to focus on building more sophisticated data collection mechanisms to make the most of every interaction and gather relevant insights about users, enabling better audience segmentation.

At the moment, we are serving hundreds of clients, primarily from the corporate sector, and we’ve seen an upward trend in email volume, which increased by about 10% this year. Since last year, we’ve also started offering event management and CRM solutions.

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*This interview was edited by Romania Insider for White Image.