Product category:
Direct Marketing
News Release from: Alchemetrics
Edited by the Marketingservicestalk Editorial
Team on 31 May 2007
Emap boosts multi-channel marketing
Data management specialists Alchemetrics have helped publisher Emap Consumer Media to maximise multi-channel marketing opportunities.
Emap Consumer Media comprises the majority of Emap's consumer magazine portfolio in the UK and overseas It publishes titles in the UK such as heat, Zoo, Grazia, FHM, Closer, Empire, Max Power, Angling Times and Today's Golfer
It also encompasses Emap's music television channels and the ticketing website Aloud.com.
With over 70 different brands under one company, Emap Consumer Media faced the vast challenge of consolidating its customer database, which contains over seven million customer contacts.
Its aim was to transform the data into a format that could sustain various campaigns, to convert news-stand readers into subscribers and contribute to overall product development.
Individuals contained in the database included: active customers, lapsed customers, competition winners and entrants and ticket purchasers.
Contact details were collected from four different channels including postal returns, email and SMS.
This represented a challenge in terms of ensuring that the details were all accurate and that permission information was accurate and adhered to in terms of future communications.
Opt-in specifications had to be considered for each of the four channels to ensure future communications were delivered via the most appropriate channel for each customer.
SMS data presented one of the most significant challenges as customers were very limited with the details shared.
As a result, the records lacked important information such as date of birth and gender.
Emap worked closely with marketing database solutions company Alchemetrics in order to harness the full power of its data.
By appending outside data sources from Experian, it could fill any missing gaps in the details.
The database was then screened against the Mailing Preference Service (MPS), the Baby Mailing Preference Service, Mortascreen, The Bereavement Register and the Gone Away Suppression File.
Emap's subscription activities gave it a method of notification for any change of contact details, and checks were run against the database on a fortnightly basis.
With 70 brands, each with their own brand managers using the system, it was imperative that Alchemetrics ensured consistency in terms of record updates.
In addition, both parties agreed on business rules and Emap's marketers were able to select the appropriate data for a campaign, then choose the desired communications channel.
The system was designed so that once this selection was made; it would assign the correct permissioning guidance for each record.
With a new-found confidence in data quality, Emap trialled three-year-old data which gave surprising results: the campaign response rate was more than double that of a similar campaign using data just six months old.
Alex Pickering, marketing database manager at Emap, said of the project: "We now have the confidence to contact older data - in the past 12 months, data hygiene has been improved tenfold.".
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