Packard Bell boosts customer lifetime value by 50% with an innovative European loyalty programme

Background
With a 19.1% share of the overall home PC market in the UK and 16% in Europe, Packard Bell is today the number one home PC brand in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK*. In both the UK and continental Europe, Packard Bell has a committed focus on the consumer market. Its digital-entertainment oriented strategy is founded on the quality of its goods and services and a closeness to consumers built on its long-standing relationship with Europe’s leading retailers – including the Dixons Store Group within the UK. Thanks to Neolane and a committed relationship marketing policy, Packard Bell is continuing to increase its profile as a consumer brand in Europe.

Context
"To shore up our position in a dynamic marketplace, we are implementing a customer-loyalty program to consolidate our long-term customer relationships," explains Françoise Pourqué, European Customer Marketing manager. This innovative programme, now deployed across 7 European countries, aims to communicate with customers from the outset. Shortly after the initial purchase, the customer receives a thank-you message and an invitation to join a loyalty programme. From then on, the customer regularly receives information, advice and special offers to help them make full use of their PC and to encourage them to turn to Packard Bell for future purchases.

Challenge
Each month, Packard Bell performs 450 to 500 marketing actions in eight languages, using a database of 1,000,000 addresses. Certain messages are sent automatically: A thank-you message the day after the purchase, a sales proposal 3 months after the activation of a trial version of software, a memory extension offer 18 months after purchasing a PC, etc. Others are scheduled independently: product launches, seasonal offers, discount sales, etc. "We don't wish to 'pollute' our customer service with too many offers, and I have to manage a wide range of parameters: volume, frequency, style, content and language", confides Françoise Pourqué, whose job it is to liaise with the communication managers in the different European subsidiaries. The answer? Rationalise and automate all the processes. Packard Bell turned to Neolane for the solution.

The Neolane solution
Today, Neolane automates all of Packard Bell's e-marketing campaigns. "Neolane is in the loop, right from the start of our processes". Directly interfaced with Packard Bell's CRM system, Neolane provides data capture features and then builds and manages the marketing datamart used for the customer loyalty programme. The tool enables them to perform segmentations and extractions according to different criteria: purchase date, purchase type, warranty expiry, reactions to previous messages, etc. Then text and images are brought together. Neolane automatically takes care of the page layout and personalisation. By simply clicking the 'Pressproof' button, the message is submitted to the different managers in Europe for validation. As and when approvals are received, Neolane executes the delivery. Each individual message is systematically tracked and Neolane provides real-time reporting on delivery, opening and click rates, etc.. Neolane continues to feed the marketing datamart with information on reactions. For example, customers interested in a given offer and who wish to be contacted by a sales representative are fed to the outbound phone database. Recipients who do not respond to e-mail solicitation can be approached through another channel, notably direct mail.

Benefits
"It really shows that Neolane is a tool designed with marketing professionals in mind. Its interface, which is very user-friendly, covers the whole marketing process, from the datamart to reporting and analytics; it enables us to manage huge marketing campaigns in a simple manner and make use of much functionality," enthuses Françoise Pourqué. "Most importantly, with this loyalty programme, we have managed to extend our customer relationships from a maximum of 1 year to over 3 years. This has increased brand awareness for subsequent purchases and has been key in boosting our customer lifetime value by 50%".

Freed at last from mundane technical chores, thanks to Neolane's strengths in automation, marketing teams can now concentrate on their main jobs. The result is opening rates ranging from 35% to 50%, for over 97% of messages sent! "Neolane enables us, for no extra cost, to qualify certain lists. On a recent phone campaign, we achieved a 15% purchase-transformation rate," says Françoise Pourqué with pride.

Principally a marketing tool, Neolane fits snugly within the European IT architecture. Interfaced with CRM databases centrally located in Holland, it is used by communications managers at the country level. "We chose to standardise on the English-language version in order to have a shared user experience". Neolane has no difficulty in handling multi-lingual content: "Each subsidiary tailors messages for the local market. I simply need to check the style guide and visual guidelines before validating campaigns. We have also created a set of business rules so that no recipient receives two messages in a short space of time".

Finally, Neolane's reporting functionality enables both an executive view and the ability to drill down to the country level. The different subsidiaries can see their results and compare them to their neighbours, "which is a rich source of exchange and insight".

Future plans
In the medium term, the marketing teams at Packard Bell intend to leverage Neolane to implement a total multi-channel marketing strategy: outbound phone for over-clicked but untransformed e-mails, detecting 'hot' prospects for different offers, direct-mail follow-up for unopened e-mail messages, etc.

"Today, we cannot trace the final purchase act in the high street but we will be able to do this in the future with Neolane. By inserting a barcode in our messages, the customer will be able to print it out and take this to the store for specific special offers". This barcode, which will be automatically decoded by Neolane, will enable Packard Bell to track indirect sales with precision — something that was impossible up until now.

* Source: IDC - January 2004