DALLAS, TX — February 12, 2009 — Alliance Data Systems Corporation (NYSE: ADS), a leading provider of loyalty and marketing solutions derived from transaction-rich data, today announced that its Epsilon business has signed a multi-year agreement with Vermont-based America’s Gardening Resource, Inc. (AGR), marketers of Gardener’s Supply and Dutch Gardens catalog and online brands. AGR is a leading manufacturer and retailer of gardening tools, products and supplies.
Under the terms of the agreement, Epsilon, a leading provider of multi-channel, data-driven marketing technologies and services, will build and maintain AGR’s customer marketing database, and Abacus, an Epsilon business, will be AGR’s exclusive service provider for direct marketing efforts. Leveraging capabilities across Epsilon and Abacus’ suite of solutions for all of their direct marketing needs, AGR will be able to better target prospects, track and interpret sales activity across catalog and web channels, readily access its customer database, and gain both time and cost efficiencies in marketing operations.
Epsilon’s Abacus division will serve as AGR’s single provider of marketing data for all customer acquisition campaigns by utilizing highly predictive transactional behavior data. Through its cooperative database offering, Abacus’ 1,500+ multi-channel retail clients provide customer purchasing data (universally recognized as a key predictor of future buying behavior) to the cooperative database in exchange for access to the database as they create and execute data-driven marketing campaigns. Using this data – which represents more than 109 million U.S. households and nearly 9 billion customer transactions – along with proprietary modeling and analytics techniques, Abacus will help AGR leverage customer insight to optimize their acquisition and retention marketing efforts.
Epsilon’s marketing database solution will capture all AGR customer data and includes an innovative process for merging Abacus modeled names with AGR’s customer file directly within the database while also performing data hygiene processes. Parallel processing of all marketing files provides AGR a more sophisticated and efficient process compared with traditional procedures where those actions are conducted separately outside the database.
“We are focused on increasing the frequency of purchases from our existing customers while expanding our market share and lowering overall direct marketing expenditures,” said Jeff Govoni, director of marketing, America’s Gardening Resource, Inc.. “Epsilon offers a comprehensive solution with sophisticated capabilities that will help us achieve that goal.”
“To effectively market to current customers and prospects, companies need to utilize the latest tools, data and analytics,” said Bryan Kennedy, president of Epsilon. “Our complete data and data management solutions along with our world-class talent will substantially improve America’s Gardening Resource’s marketing effectiveness and will allow them to acquire and grow profitable customer relationships in an ever-changing marketing environment.”
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