June 19, 2008
EMI’s New Tune Wins New Fans )Neolane)
Company: Neolane
Brand: EMI Music
Background: EMI Music is one of the top global recorded music companies, representing artists spanning all musical tastes and genres including Lily Allen, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Coldplay, Norah Jones, Kylie Minogue, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones.
Traditionally relying on mass market brick-and-mortar retailers to drive market share and revenues, the emergence of digital media formats and the popularity of online retailers like iTunes dramatically impacted EMI Music’s margins. As sales of CDs began to plummet, the music industry as a whole was left scrambling to reinvent itself.
Objective: Facing declining revenues and lagging consumer demand, EMI Music Europe moved to embrace the digital music age. However, it quickly recognized that if its business model was undergoing a transformation, so too would its marketing and sales strategies. No longer able to rely on mass marketing to drive in-store sales, EMI Music had to figure out who, exactly, was downloading its artists’ music, and how to maximize communications with those consumers on the right channel to strengthen relationships and drive more revenue.
Solution: EMI Music opted for enterprise marketing software from Neolane. Neolane helped EMI to organize customer data derived from different databases, from numerous data capture systems, and from various channels, including registration cards, email, direct mail and artist websites. Neolane’s platform allows EMI Music to capture and store customer data in a centralized database, and to continually merge, purge and de-duplicate the information. Subsequently, EMI Music’s marketing staff is able to precisely target customers according to media habits and preferences, musical tastes, online behavior, shopping habits and sociodemographics. Today, nearly 100 targeted campaigns are launched each month on the basis of these criteria.
Now, EMI Music can work seamlessly across multiple channels including direct, email and mobile, enabling EMI Music to send SMS )Short Message Service or text) messages to alert fans about upcoming events, new ringtones and screensavers.
“We needed to bring all of this data together to gain better insight into our fans’ purchasing behavior and preferences. As a result, we are able to drive better customer interactions across multiple channels, including email and SMS in particular,” said Guillaume Pech-Gourg, Head of Content and Customer Relationship Management at EMI Music France.
Results: Just 18 months after implementing Neolane’s automated marketing solution, EMI Music’s digital revenues have nearly offset the decline in physical sales, which demonstrated the effectiveness of its new marketing approach. Now the company is on track to meet projected goals of ensuring 25 percent of sales revenue come from legitimate music downloads by 2010.
Today, EMI Music depends on Neolane to help execute its relationship marketing strategies, promote its artists, maintain fan clubs, run surveys and draws, and to encourage customer loyalty. Neolane’s enterprise marketing platform works seamlessly across various direct, email and mobile marketing channels, allowing EMI Music to send SMS messages to music fans that have opted in through email or direct mail, alerting them to upcoming concerts, new ringtones and screensavers. And later this year, the company will begin rolling out MMS )multimedia messaging service) campaigns that offer access to artist photos and video clips on 3G wireless devices, and allow music downloads directly to new generation multi-media cell phones.
