Entertainment giant Ster-Kinekor has chosen Striata as its strategic e-mail messaging partner. As a business driven by consumer activity statistics, Ster-Kinekor is now able to tap into the rich reporting functionality available from Striata's eMarketing Suite.
Says Ster-Kinekor IT Director, John Campbell: "One of the key challenges we faced was a missing link in our chain of information pertaining to e-mail campaign performance. Coupled with the sheer volume of communication generated around movie releases, the choice to outsource e-mail message delivery was an obvious one."
Striata's eMarketing Suite plugs this gap with comprehensive reporting on e-mail delivery, message open-rates as well as click-through rates. This information is fed into Ster-Kinekor's database, and used as another indicator of customer behaviour.
CRM Manager at Ster-Kinekor, Claira Mallett, sees the additional statistics as vital to her ability to target marketing campaigns accurately. "Thanks to our Movie Club, we are able to track movie attendance of our members as well as identify behaviour trends and customer preferences. We then use this information to customise our communications according to a member's buying behaviour. Our ultimate goal is to get more people watching more movies."
To achieve this goal, Ster-Kinekor's existing campaign management software and database segmentation tools are now part of an integrated workflow process that executes e-mail campaigns through Striata's eMarketing software.
According to Campbell, this enables Ster-Kinekor to not only improve its e-mail delivery rates, but also to incorporate the e-mail-based activity of members into its marketing statistics.
Striata MD, Alison Wright, is very excited about the value that Striata can provide to Ster-Kinekor's electronic communication. "Our objective in working with Ster-Kinekor is to become an essential partner in their digital marketing activities. This includes providing messaging strategy advice, identifying trends in their messaging performance and customer activity reports, as well as constantly working to improve their delivery rates and feed valuable information back into the business."
As a specialist in e-mail delivery, Striata has built up a phenomenal knowledge base around e-mail delivery both locally and internationally. Wright says this is one of the company's key value propositions to clients like Ster-Kinekor.
"Sending the e-mail is a small part of the value we can add. The e-mail landscape is changing so rapidly, with increased awareness of spam and viruses, that a business needing to get legitimate e-mail communication through to its customers must have specialist skills to succeed."
Wright says Striata was happy to illustrate the value of its messaging capabilities through a proof of concept campaign late last year. "Ster-Kinekor was both shocked and delighted by the level of information we provided on the campaign, giving them a strong indication of the hygiene of their member database, starting with basic delivery reporting on successful and unsuccessful e-mail deliveries."
Why not build the skills and technology to do this in-house?
Campbell's view is that Ster-Kinekor follows a successful outsourcing policy, particularly when it comes to specific areas of technology and related services. "We believe in partnering with specialists in each key area of our IT requirements. This ensures that we have access to the top resources that are leaders in their area of expertise."
This approach has resulted in Striata joining a highly capable team of service providers that work closely with Ster-Kinekor to get the best possible results from their IT investments.
Says Wright: "Working with Ster-Kinekor's design team, and their software development partners, has been a valuable experience for us. Having capable specialists responsible for each part of the process, means that standards are high, both technically and from a service perspective."
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Striata is an application software developer and service provider focused on enabling electronic communication. The Striata Application Platform provides highly flexible, robust and scalable products deployable across multiple operating systems. Striata's solutions are applicable to organisations that view efficient communication with customers and stakeholders as a vital component of their success.
Striata also specialises in the secure delivery and payment of bills, statements, invoices and all other confidential documents, via encrypted e-mail.
Striata has been a provider of software and services in the electronic messaging arena since 1999 and has offices in New York, London, Sydney and Johannesburg and partners in Dublin, Frankfurt, Atlanta, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Honolulu, Sydney and Cape Town. Visit www.striata.com.
Ster-Kinekor
Ster-Kinekor is a business unit of Primovie, the subsidiary company housing the filmed entertainment business of Primedia Limited, the South African JSE-listed media group established in 1994. Ster-Kinekor is the largest cinema exhibitor in SA with 47 cinemas countrywide and five drive-ins totalling 348 screens and over 50 000 seats. It sells 500 tons of popcorn and 3 million litres of Coca-Cola annually to an audience in excess of 17 million. It operates the only dedicated "Arthouse" circuit in the world - Cinema Nouveau as well as a Bollywood circuit and has over 1.25 million members in its Movie Club.
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