Wanadoo Data prospects using Neolane

Background
Wanadoo Data, a subsidiary of France Telecom, specialises in selling and renting qualified B2C and B2B prospect lists for use in multi-channel campaigns including direct mail, phone, e-mail, and SMS. Wanadoo Data personalises and fine-tunes e-mail campaigns for its clients using Neolane software. As the market leader, Wanadoo Data naturally equipped itself with the best technology available to respond to the needs of demanding clients such as Renault, American Express, Cetelem, Orange and the various divisions of France Telecom.

Context
Previously, Wanadoo Data used Annuncio (PeopleSoft CRM) to run their e-mail campaigns. "As a tool, it wasn't really suited to our way of prospecting and required too many manual operations," reminisces Jean-Guillaume Goulhot, director of the Data division. For each campaign, Wanadoo Data selects targets from its database of e-mails, which includes millions of records gathered from Opt-In programmes held by a dozen or so major partner companies. Personalisation items are then included in the client's message and the campaign is launched. Managing a high degree of personalisation and optimising high-volume routing is at the crux of Wanadoo Data's core business. It is in this context that the Neolane software suite offers its full added value.

Challenge
Every week, Wanadoo Data processes 5 to 10 prospecting campaigns that include tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses; The smallest start at 5000 recipients, the largest often reach a million... "We aim to give our clients the best the market has to offer in the e-mail prospecting domain," says Jean-Guillaume Goulhot. Wanadoo Data wished to have ample capacity to fulfil all its campaign schedules and to have real-time reporting capability made available to its clients over the Web. After a call for tenders that brought together all the major market players, "Neolane's response stood out to us in terms of their product and their ability to execute," underlines Jean-Guillaume Goulhot.

The Neolane solution
In production since 2003, the Neolane solution handles personalisation, execution, and reporting for millions of messages each month. Via the company Intranet, campaign teams at Wanadoo Data extract the defined targets from their huge database and include their messages. Using Neolane tools, they then specify the level of personalisation required both inside and outside of the main text. This ranges from basic salutations to personalisation based on much more elaborate parameters such as coupon-scheme status, purchase volume over time, etc. In addition, messages include the appropriate programme headers and footers depending on the origin of the address. Neolane handles each of these personalisation processes in full. As soon as the clients give the final go-ahead, Wanadoo Data moves in to active campaign mode. Once more, Neolane tools handle the full campaign automation all the way through to analytics and reporting.

Benefits

• Increased productivity. Previously, the different teams at Wanadoo Data had to perform a large number of operations by hand in order to personalise messages, programme by programme. Today, Neolane does all of this automatically. "It's a remarkable step up for us in productivity. We've cut processing time by a factor of two. And in some cases by three!" enthuses Olivier Moulene, manager of the e-mailing cell. Today, the teams at Wanadoo Data prepare a campaign in under an hour.
• Optimised routing. Wanadoo Data can now count on Neolane's optimised routing functionality, which handles the routing constraints imposed by the ISP. "No risk of being blacklisted!"
• Opt-in compliance. Wanadoo Data is very sensitive to the subject of statutory opt-in compliance. Neolane functionality makes sure opt-in and opt-out requests are respected. In an increasingly strict legal environment, this enables Wanadoo Data to prove its reliability and added value to its clients.
• Increased audience. Thanks to Neolane's viral marketing module, Wanadoo Data provides its clients with the opportunity to reach a wider audience based on the principle of referrals.
• Real-time reporting. Another proof of the effectiveness of Wanadoo Data's operations is the ability to provide real-time Web-based campaign reporting. Clients can access the full range of statistics concerning their campaign: number of messages routed, percentage received, percentage opened, link tracking, order amounts for campaign ROI calculations. "With Neolane, we can automatically deliver all of these statistics directly to our clients via the Web," adds Jean-Guillaume Goulhot.

Future plans
Today, Wanadoo Data is expanding its scope of activity in the relationship marketing area. With this aim in mind, Wanadoo Data is counting on Neolane's strengths in creating marketing datamarts. "Neolane's offering is state of the art and very flexible. It covers all the steps in relationship marketing from creating marketing databases to automating customer interactions – which are precisely those aspects we are looking to develop…", concludes Jean-Guillaume Goulhot.