MINNEAPOLIS - Sept. 24, 2007 - Prograde, a Cincinnati-based print distributor that provides integrated marketing and e-commerce services, recently won Print Solutions magazine's Award of Excellence in the e-commerce category of the 2007 Print Excellence And Knowledge Awards. For this award-winning project, and for much of its other work, Prograde uses Four51's Web-to-print application, a Web-based platform for managing marketing collateral and other merchandise and printed materials.
A Prograde customer, First Financial Bank, underwent a broad re-branding campaign that included a new logo, an updated tagline, and a whole new look and feel. To promote the new brand to the world, First Financial wanted its employees to show off the logo and tagline with a wealth of branded office supplies, apparel and other promotional products.
Prograde had already developed a "BankStore" e-commerce site for First Financial employees to order and track the bank's forms and supplies. For this new branding campaign, Prograde developed a "Bonus Buck" program that let bank employees use individualized gift cards loaded with the bank's money to buy shirts, jackets, pens, golf balls, portfolios and many other items with the bank's new colors and logo.
"With the Four51 application, we built a program that let us print customized gift cards with a unique ID number for each of the 1,500 employees and manage the whole program from top to bottom," said Mark Hendrickson, director of e-commerce at Prograde. "The Bonus Buck program tracked which gift cards were used, how much was spent and what merchandise was purchased. The bank used its big employee base to market its new look, and the Four51 application tracked everything and helped control costs."
This most recent award is the second Award of Excellence Prograde has earned using the Four51 application. Gary Nemcek, co-founder and president of the networks group at Four51, attributes the success to Prograde's creativity and the power of automation with technology.
"It's one thing to come up with a creative campaign to accomplish a marketing goal, which First Financial and Prograde obviously accomplished," Nemcek said. "But functionality and usability can make or break a great idea. I'm glad our e-commerce application was able to help bring this vision to life."