IVIS Group accelerates Online Marketing Programme for Tesco.com

London, 9 November 2005 - IVIS Group, the multi-channel experts, today announced that its Sonetto Channel Information Management (CIM) solution will underpin Tesco.com's new online marketing programme. From today, the world's largest online grocery retailer will use Sonetto CIM to improve the customer's buying experience and increase the effectiveness of its partner relationships.

Online marketing is a growing collaborative retail channel for online brands. Retailers partner with affiliate networks and price comparison websites who provide customer-focused online shopping services. The marketing channel drives customers to the retailer's website and increases sales. A recent report from E-consultancy suggests UK sales of online brands generated through such relationships will double from £600m to £1.1bn+ between 2004 and 2005.

More than half of the customers who buy electrical goods from Tesco.com find the website through this programme. Adding new partners to the programme and customising data feeds to them were two areas where Tesco.com could achieve big improvements in marketing effectiveness. While the process of adding a new partner has been reduced from two weeks to less than a week with Sonetto CIM, the real business advantage lies in having the agility to apply changes to data feeds quickly.

"For its nine largest partners, Tesco.com has to manage 20-30 separate data feeds per day covering hundreds of thousands of products. Each partner needs the product data in a specific format which differs from Tesco.com's internal data format," explains Qusai Sarraf, CEO of IVIS Group. "Each time Tesco.com needs to amend an existing partner feed in response to changes in marketing trends, a process which used to take two weeks now happens almost instantaneously with Sonetto CIM."

Tesco.com's marketing team no longer need IT support to provide data feeds on a day-to-day basis but can now select the optimal product set for each partner, amend and enrich feeds and make changes in real-time. Tesco.com expects to see benefits in the first week of operation and anticipates at least a 20% increase in clickthrough rates and over 50% improvement in return from affiliate marketing spend.

"Sonetto gives our marketing team powerful product data enrichment and data feed formatting capabilities," explains Jon Higgins, Technical Director at Tesco.com. "We have been partnering with IVIS Group since our inception in 1996, this project is a further validation of the strength of our relationship."

About IVIS Group

IVIS Group helps organisations reach their customers across all of their information channels. Providing a range of services and products, IVIS Group is the multi-channel expert.

IVIS Group has worked with many companies from a range of industries each driven by their customers to create value through the better use of information.

For more information on IVIS Group and its solutions visit: www.ivisgroup.com.