Twickenham, UK
February 12, 2009

With Neolane, La Redoute boosts Dynamic Customer Marketing Online

Leading French home shopping brand relies on Neolane's cross-channel marketing optimisation platform to deliver a unique, personalised online shopping experience

Enterprise marketing software provider Neolane, Inc. today announced that Redcats Group company, La Redoute, France's leading home shopping brand, is using the Neolane marketing automation platform to offer its online shopping customers a unique, personalised shopping experience.

La Redoute stands out as a pioneer and an example to others in terms of both customer relations and e-commerce. The home shopping specialist is now equipping its online shopping site with new, advanced marketing functions combining sales and transactional messages in a cross-channel environment. This approach reinforces the growing success of its e-commerce site, sales through which now accounts for more than 50 percent of La Redoute's business volume.

With the proportion of its sales online increasing, La Redoute, like most other major e-commerce sites, must equip itself to deal with all aspects of online customer relations. This means that it must have a marketing solution that lets it:

• Personalise every message according to the profile and needs of the customer or prospect
• Automate relationship and loyalty programmes
• Manage consistency between online offers and messages delivered via other customer interaction channels
• Dynamically manage marketing contact frequency
• Be extremely reactive with regard to defining and launching campaigns, while maintaining a very high level of e-mail deliverability

This led to the decision in 2008 to create an innovative relationship marketing system enabling the total personalisation of marketing and transactional messages. This project, led by the marketing and e-commerce department of La Redoute, aims to implement a new customer marketing approach based on individualised messages and striving for consistency in all messages broadcast, irrespective of the sales channel used. Its intention is to cultivate a unique shopping experience for greater customer satisfaction.

“Online customers have increasingly high expectations concerning the relevance of the messages we send them, the quality of our relationship with them, and the volume of marketing messages they receive, ” said Guillaume Darrousez, La Redoute's marketing and e-commerce director. “Because La Redoute has always been at the forefront of customer relationship marketing practice, we had to find a way to satisfy this threefold requirement.”

A user of the Neolane platform since 2006, La Redoute decided to take greater advantage of the wealth of functionality provided by the Neolane platform. Back then, La Redoute started using Neolane in hosted mode, with the individual personalisation functions providing only an initial level of one-to-one e-mail communication. Customers receiving e-mail messages were still defined using another tool installed internally and operated by dedicated teams.

La Redoute has now initiated a more far-reaching approach. It has decided to:

• Internalise the online marketing database into its own information system in order to implement more advanced and reactive marketing functionality
• Use Mid-sourcing® mode in order to benefit from Neolane's expertise in the execution of e-mail campaigns and deliverability management
• Use the platform's built-in targeting and segmentation functions
• Take advantage of the one-to-one message personalisation functionality to bolster the brand relationship while increasing sales
• Incorporate personalised marketing messages in transactional e-mails; this would include order confirmations, item cancellations, catalogue requests, and password reminders
• Create automated customer journeys based on customer triggers and promoting greater proximity and immediate reactivity

The Neolane platform now centralises all types of e-mail for better sales efficiency. Another tangible result is an improved e-mail deliverability rate; this crucial e-commerce indicator has been optimised, illustrating the expertise of La Redoute and Neolane in this area.

“We are proud to support La Redoute in the upgrading of its marketing strategy. The confidence in our technologies that this distance sales specialist has shown for more than two years is a testament to our product's ability to perform and add value to a business,” said Jeremy Bedford, country manager, Neolane (UK) limited. “We pay close attention to changes in consumer behaviour, and we are constantly adjusting our solutions to provide marketing departments with the tools to meet their business challenges, no matter what their level of experience in relationship marketing - even for expert marketers like La Redoute.”

About La Redoute

For more information on La Redoute, see: www.laredoute.com

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