Interview: Press group EBRA implemented expiration dates in emails

EBRA is France’s leading press group, with 9 regional newspapers and 800,000 copies distributed daily, and 18.7 million unique visitors per month on its websites.

A few months ago, the group decided to work on the topic of email expiration dates. A project that came to fruition in October 2025 with the deployment across all of EBRA Group‘s mass emails.

We met with Gaëlle Crozier (Head of Acquisition and Retention) to have her explain how the project unfolded.

Interview

Jonathan Loriaux – Could you introduce the EBRA Group and explain your role in the project?

Jonathan Loriaux – What was your role in the email expiration dates project?

Gaëlle Crozier – I had attended Badsender’s YouTube live session that took place in December 2024. And immediately, I liked the project because I’m a very bad student when it comes to managing my inbox. I think I have 5,000 unread emails in my inbox, and I thought to myself: “If I’m like this, there are plenty of other people who are too.”

I mentioned it to Emilie Hubert, who is the data and CRM product manager within the Group, to find out if she was aware of it and to tell her that I wanted to champion this topic at the group level. She was already aware of it through Cofidis, which is also a subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel and was already supporting the project.

In parallel, I brought the message to the CSR and corporate communication teams to verify everyone’s buy-in for the project. And that was the case.

Jonathan Loriaux – At what level do email expiration dates fit into the EBRA group’s CSR strategy? What are the other initiatives?

Gaëlle Crozier – The EBRA Group is committed daily to reducing its carbon footprint. For example, between 2023 and 2024, we reduced our CO2 emissions by 17%. Many actions are being taken on the print side. We try to adopt an eco-responsible approach in choosing materials and printing processes. For example, our paper is recycled and comes from sustainably managed forests. We’ve done tests with vegetable-based ink. We work with a reverse logistics process in which we recover unsold copies to transform them back into paper that we can use for manufacturing newspapers. On the digital side, we deploy our responsible digital policy right into the design of digital products, regularly monitoring and reducing the weight of videos, digital images, and all websites. To consolidate these actions, the EBRA Group raises employee awareness of digital eco-gestures, particularly with the “Clean Up Your Workstation” operation. In 2025, more than 250,000 emails and 4 million files were deleted by our internal collaborators. Email Expiration Date fits perfectly into this dynamic.

Jonathan Loriaux – What were the steps in implementing expiration dates? What were the challenges from a technical or organizational perspective?

Gaëlle Crozier – Since October 1, 2025, the script (for adding the expiration date in Adobe Campaign, editor’s note) has been present in our newsletter emails and it will be developed later for all our marketing communications. On the technical level, I really have the impression that there were no issues. It was quite smooth. On the team level, the only small concern we had was that adding this script might break our emails, but we did tests and it really didn’t change the aesthetics of the emails at all. There were no side effects. So really, it was quite simple.

Jonathan Loriaux – What advice would you like to give to other companies that want to follow the same path?

Gaëlle Crozier – I think you need to take the plunge. The project really excited all stakeholders. It’s a cross-functional project. You need to discuss with marketing, technical, and CSR teams. Everyone is concerned and then everyone will champion the project. As soon as we presented it, we had total buy-in.

Jonathan Loriaux – Between the moment there was a theoretical go-ahead and the moment it was implemented, how much time passed?

Gaëlle Crozier – I must have contacted Emilie in early January. After that, there was a bit of latency, the time to connect with Cofidis. So let’s say ten months. Like any company, we also had other priorities on our plate. But on the implementation with the technical teams, it didn’t take much time. We also had a major overhaul of our newsletters that have been in place since September. So between September and October 1st, it went pretty quickly once we had these new newsletters set up.

Jonathan Loriaux – Have you planned to go further on other elements of responsible emailing? What are the next steps for you on that side?

Gaëlle Crozier – What we’re trying to do is optimize our targeting. There’s a big topic there, sending the right message to the right person. We’re working on implementing a CDP, a Customer Data Platform, to have a 360 view of our subscribers and prospects. We want to implement scoring to know them better, to know if they’re more receptive to commercial offers, if they’re at risk of churning, so we can reach out to them at the right time.

We also want to implement a Preference Center. We still do mass communications and we really want to move toward much more targeted communications and limit volumes based on the themes we want to send.