Centrica, one of Australia's fastest growing print, mail and marketing support companies located in North Ryde, New South Wales, recently leveraged XMPie PersonalEffect  cross-media software for a customer acquisition campaign highlighting its one-to-one, cross-media expertise and services. The company decided the best way to demonstrate its highly effective, cross-media offerings was to deliver a targeted campaign that touched recipients multiple times through a variety of media channels.
 
The "VIP Backstage Pass" themed campaign used PersonalEffect to generate personalized postcards, Web sites and response mechanisms, allowing Centrica to conveniently leverage one solution and a single database to expertly and accurately drive each medium.  The full-color postcard, printed on a Xerox DocuColor 2060, was sent to 2,450 prospects and featured an image of a backstage pass personalized with the recipient's name and company.  The postcard directed the recipient to a personalized Response URL (RURL) Web site where he/she could learn more about Centrica's services.
 
In addition to generating the personalized cross-media communications, PersonalEffect also enabled Centrica to collect more information about each recipient through the RURL site.  Each site featured messaging that was strategically devised to encourage recipients to explore new ways to effectively reach their customers and incorporated a "clipboard questionnaire" for recipients to respond to questions about how Centrica could help with their customer communication campaigns. The information collected was automatically and instantaneously fed back into the campaign's database for future use by Centrica.
 
To keep costs down, Centrica designed a postcard-sized mail piece and did not include a special offer or incentive to recipients. Despite these challenges, the campaign, whose results Centrica tracked and analyzed with PersonalEffect's built-in uProduce Marketing Console, generated an impressive five percent response rate and received recognition at the XMPie Users Group Best of the Best awards.
 
"It demonstrates more than ever before that personalized and relevant communication is driving the way consumers want to receive information," said Roland Knight, managing director, Centrica. "With most response rates to acquisition campaigns sitting at between one and two percent, we were understandably delighted with the outcome."