Richmond upon Thames - September 5, 2007

Meetic selects Neolane to run its worldwide relationship marketing programme

Neolane, Europe’s reference software vendor for customer marketing and communications, now counts Meetic among its customers.

Since its launch in 2002, Meetic, better known in the UK as the operator of Dating Direct, has established itself as the European leader of internet dating services. It is currently continuing its expansion into Latin America and Asia. In order to reach growth targets, the company recently focused attention on its customer acquisition and loyalty strategy. Meetic investigated leading e-mail marketing solutions.

In June 2006, Meetic implemented Neolane as its global marketing communications platform linked with all of its websites worldwide.

"We wanted to unify our two existing technology platforms – the first for marketing, the second for real-time alert messages. Additionally, we needed to have a single view of the customer – to enable consistency of communications. And on top of this, we wanted to personalise content in emails and alert messages to a much greater extent than our existing content management tools allowed," said Emmanuel Prevost, Meetic’s Chief Technical Officer.

Meetic sought a communications solution that would give marketing independent control over customer relationship mechanisms and which would be robust and reliable technically.

After evaluating a number of marketing communications solutions, Meetic selected Neolane. Today, Neolane supports Meetic’s e-mail marketing worldwide, enabling content personalisation to the specific profile of the customer (an individual message can potentially have 10 000 possible combinations). It is also used to automate customer journeys with standardised responses to specific inbound communications, time lapses and events.

At the heart of Neolane is a collaborative workflow engine. The solution is an integrated application that is capable of orchestrating campaign planning and execution, while simultaneously handling all communication channels (direct mail, email, SMS, etc.). The solution also makes it possible to model “customer journeys”, reactivate inactive customers, design and automate loyalty programmes, deliver highly-personalised communications and target customers while controlling marketing contact frequency.

“We are delighted to count Meetic among our customers and to accompany them in their international marketing strategy,” enthused François Laxalt, Marketing Director, Europe at Neolane. “This project is a perfect illustration of the agility and the effectiveness of the Neolane solution in the domains of message personalisation and of complex marketing process automation in an international environment.”

Since deploying Neolane, Meetic has been able to run over 1500 highly targeted acquisition and loyalty campaigns every month - in addition to real-time alert messages. This represents around 200 million personalised messages sent every month. With optimised deliverability, over 98% of messages reach customer inboxes.

Meetic can now dynamically personalise the contents of eight different services. For example, according to expressed preferences, country of residence and language, including for syndicated sites. “We can also model and automate the relationship program according to a welcome path, daily selections of user profiles, newsletters, and so on,” continued Philippe Chainieux, Managing Director at Meetic.

After using Neolane for just a few months, Meetic declares many benefits:

- A marked improvement in its knowledge of customers and prospects: Each step of their journey is directly integrated in the datamart; all actions (opens, click-throughs) are recorded whether they result from marketing campaigns or alert messages.

- Improved productivity thanks to customer journey and campaign automation: For example, Meetic has been able to automate a welcome journey over 60 days for new members.

- Improved conversion rates resulting from highly personalised communication with the customer depending on nationality, the partner site operating the service, the type of profile sought and so on.

- A very consistent customer experience (real time alerting and marketing) thanks to a unified global marketing communications platform.

About Neolane
Neolane is a provider of enterprise solutions for customer-oriented marketing and outbound communications which enable organisations to create a single marketing view of their customers and prospects in a unified datamart. By orchestrating multiple channels to market, e.g. e-mail, direct mail, SMS, web, telephone on an in-house or mid-sourced platform, marketing professionals gain complete control over their campaigns and a whole range of automated and ad-hoc outbound communications (alerts, notifications, e-billing, statements, business documents) through advanced editorial content management. Website: http://www.neolane.com
Major international accounts have selected and run Neolane technology: Bales Worldwide, Virgin Megastores, Packard Bell, GE Real Estate, T-Online, Fnac.com, Sephora, AXA Bank, Accor Hotels, Alcatel-Lucent, BT, FINAREF, Publicis, Belgacom Skynet, Wanadoo Data, Boursorama, EMI Music, Finaref, Alapage-Marcopoly, Wolters Kluwer, Dassault Systems.