Bullseye Internet Solutions

Background

ACP Publishing is Australia's largest publisher of magazines. With over 65 titles, ACP has a leading magazine in nearly every major category and offers one of the most extensive and diverse range of titles, ranging from The Bulletin through to the number one selling Major Women's magazine, The Australian Women's Weekly.

Traditionally, the newsagent industry has been the major distribution channel for magazines in Australia. Having recently undergone deregulation, the industry is experiencing increased competition from other distribution channels such as convenience stores and supermarkets.

Business Challenge

Up until deregulation, the relationship between ACP and newsagents had been a traditional supplier-seller relationship. In a competitive marketplace, the challenge for ACP is to strengthen their commercial and operational relationship with newsagencies, as their core sales channel.

By deepening their relationship and providing greater support to newsagents, ACP will derive greater brand loyalty, and ultimately increase sales of ACP titles.

The Strategy

Bullseye worked with ACP and ad agency Clemenger Proximity to develop an online customer service and loyalty program - Connections with ACP - to incentivise newsagents, and provide greater support in their business activities.

The Connections with ACP rewards program fulfils a number of strategic objectives:

It allows newsagents to earn rewards points on sales of ACP titles that can be exchanged for ACP rewards in categories from travel to home entertainment. Clearly, this incentivises sales and promotion of ACP titles.
It provides support for the business activities of newsagents, who are typically small business owners.
It allows for increased customer service and efficiency of interaction between the supplier and sales channel.

The Solution

Bullseye developed an online system that addressed the strategic and technical goals of the Connections with ACP program.

The system has been built to address the following:

Back-end integration to the ACP sales and distribution system to allow calculation of points allocation based on title sales data.
Development of an online catalogue and redemption system to allow newsagents to redeem ACP rewards online.
Delivery of useful small business information online, to support the day-to-day operations of newsagencies as small businesses.
Integration to the ACP customer support centre via the development of a custom web-based CRM solution.
Delivery of web-based content management tools to allow ACP to manage the content on the site.
Development of integration mechanisms to fulfilment and statement printing partners.
Development of web-based financial and business reporting tools to allow ACP to manage the program online.

The site utilises Microsoft technologies including Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000 and Commerce Server 2000. The technology platform was selected to allow a scalable and highly secure environment.

	Results The response to the program from newsagents has been overwhelming. ACP signed 90 per cent of the targeted newsagents to the program within 1 month.