Richmond upon Thames, UK - September 11th, 2006
Neolane Marketing Solution Performs Live at Virgin Megastores
Following selection in June, the retailer is using Neolane to create personalised, targeted, customer-centric communications aimed at delivering customer loyalty, higher response rates and increased revenues.
Neolane, a provider of customer marketing and communication software solutions, has today announced that Virgin Megastores went live on Neolane in mid-August with the goal of winning enhanced returns from customer relationship management (CRM).
Neolane v4 will enable Virgin Megastores to present opted-in customers with communications and incentives that are intelligent to their purchase and preference profiles. Messages will be personalised in content and highly relevant to each individual, encouraging customer loyalty, higher response rates and additional revenues.
The solution also enables Virgin Megastores to run its online and offline campaigns itself, rather than outsource them. Neolane enables the company to quickly and collaboratively develop and control multiple tightly focused campaigns simultaneously from a single console.
“We have selected Neolane because we are confident it is a strong solution upon which we can develop a rich relationship with our most valuable customers, which recognises individual needs and interests,” said Steve Kincaid, marketing director of Virgin Retail. “Using Neolane, we intend to build on customer relationships by sending highly relevant, useful and engaging communications which bring about greater loyalty and purchase frequency.”
Later this year, Virgin Megastores will incorporate Electronic Point of Sale transactional retail data from users of its new student discount card, launched in September. This will enable even greater degrees of customer segmentation and purchase insight.
“Building customer relationships through communications and incentives is a core brand and revenue strategy for many companies,” said Neil Anderson, managing director of Neolane Ltd. “Virgin Megastores is following best practice by seeking to define its relationship with each customer and properly understand their purchase interests. By ensuring relevance and personalising the content of loyalty communications, our customers have significantly improved the success of their customer marketing activities. We warmly welcome the Virgin Megastores brand.”
Neolane UK and its partners will handle the consolidation of customer data from multiple sources across the retailer. They will also support the solution with an ongoing data quality foundation to ensure unified, clean and complete customer views.
Virgin Megastores selected Neolane as a hosted service option. The Neolane software is also available through a licensed model.
About Virgin Megastores
Virgin Megastores is one of the leading entertainment retailers with 126 stores throughout the UK and Ireland. Over 10 million customers shop with Virgin each year, where they can enjoy one of the widest collections of entertainment product, from the popular culture of music, film, video games, books, mobile phones and other great entertainment products.
Famous for in-store live performances, Virgin Megastores has hosted some of the biggest names in entertainment from David Beckham, Pele, Destiny's Child, Pamela Anderson, U2, Franz Ferdinand and Paul Weller. No matter how big or small the artist, Virgin is committed to providing its customers with the best entertainment from around the world.
The first Virgin record store opened in London's Oxford Street in 1971 and in 1979 the company took over the site at the end of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. This is the Megastore that we still know and love that sells around 7,000 CDs per day. As well as a high profile retail estate in the UK, including the landmark Number One Piccadilly Store, London, Virgin have stores in Ireland, USA, France, Australia, Greece, Japan, Kuwait and Lebanon. It's estimated that over 1 million people shop with Virgin Megastores in the world each day.
Richard Branson's Virgin recently launched Virgin Digital (www.virgindigital.com), its own download service in September 2005. Customers can now not only enjoy the physical product form the various stores from around the country but access over 2 million tracks.
About Neolane
Neolane is a provider of enterprise solutions for customer-oriented marketing and outbound communications. Proven to both increase sales and reduce costs, Neolane enables organisations to create a single, all-encompassing view of the customer, to perform detailed segmentation and to generate personalised content for automated communication by e-mail, direct mail, SMS, web and telephone. With Neolane, companies gain complete control over their campaigns and a whole range of automated and ad-hoc outbound communications (alerts, notifications, e-billing, statements, business documents).
Website: http://www.neolane.com
Major international accounts have selected and run Neolane technology: Virgin Megastores, Packard Bell Europe, GE Real Estate, T-Online, Fnac.com, Sephora, AXA Bank, Accor Hotels, Alcatel, BT, Publicis, Belgacom Skynet, Wanadoo Data, Boursorama, EMI Music, Finaref, Alapage-Marcopoly, Wolters Kluwer, Dassault Systems.
