Referro ft. Tilaa: How an agency keeps international data secure

6 minute read

‘If our clients are doing well, so are we.’ A modest saying of Referro, a B2B marketing firm based in Oisterwijk, The Netherlands. The marketing agency works globally and has single-handedly raised lead generation to an art form. But how do they properly handle their clients data? Jesper Mommers, team manager Marketing Technology, elaborates on all the challenges.

Can you tell us, who is Referro?

Referro is a B2B marketing agency. We once started as an agency specialized in customer satisfaction with the use of telemarketing. This year we are celebrating our 30th anniversary and we’ve grown to an international agency with multiple disciplines. Referro develops communication strategies, manages email campaigns, and ensures maximum outcomes of all digital marketing tools that can assist in generating high-quality leads. All of our efforts have one goal in mind: to generate high-quality leads.

And what makes you different from others?

Our power comes from combining marketing communication & strategy, telemarketing and marketing technology. When we put it all together, we can generate high-quality leads and maximize the return on our marketing expenditures. Other organizations frequently do one or more of them. However, it is precisely because of this balance that we all understand what we want from each other in order for the client's marketing goals to be a success. Last but not least, we’re part of an international group of agencies all around the globe. This way it’s rather easy for us to work for international clients or share knowledge with other agencies.

What technological challenges do you face in your work?

The difficulty mainly stems from the number of marketing tools involved. Referro is agnostic in terms of tooling, we work with our own preferred marketing tools as well as tools of our clients. It is important that they all work well together. Furthermore, such tools generate a large amount of data, which we must process safely. That's why we went with Tilaa. With the help of our VPSs, we can build and organize everything according to our own taste.

Collecting data is bound by many (international) regulations. How do you deal with that properly?

Obviously, by strictly adhering to the laws. It's as simple as that. In recent years, there has been a substantial advancement in data legislation. For example, GDPR. That is why, as a business that processes a lot of client data, we believe it is important that (personal) data is stored within Europe. Tilaa enables this since the data centers are also situated in the Netherlands, and therefore in Europe.

Even so, it is unavoidable that in our profession, it is often important to deal with international (ed. American) methods. We still resolve subsequent problems with the assistance of the legislation. We continuously balance between European guidelines and American tools.

What do you use your VPS for?

Well, a lot of things, but not for hosting websites. The servers are mostly used to incorporate different digital tools. We also have a server for our time registration system and another server for development and testing. All the others are set up and managed for CRM applications (SuiteCRM), hosted for and implemented with our clients.

Any last advices in terms of extra security?

Oh yes: be sure to take snapshots. We do this every night. I really can't imagine how we could lose anything anymore. It's almost impossible. For eg, we perform a manual backup of the database's critical tables every 2 hours, and a managed backup is done every day. We also do this to ensure that our backup time is durable for our clients. It's better to be safe than sorry!