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Underwired acquires eCRM.co.uk
11th October, 2007
Independent digital agency Underwired - whose clients include Peugeot, Virgin Megastores, News International, Institute of Cancer Research and Deutsche Bank - has launched a new website focused specifically on its eCRM work.
Underwired recently announced that eCRM now accounts for 50% of its revenue, and it has made board-level changes accordingly, most notably replacing its planning director with a specialist eCRM team, and hiring former director of Results International Tony Bond as its finance director.
The agency manages eCRM and email marketing programmes for Virgin Holidays, Nickelodeon and Nick Jr, and LA Fitness. Underwired also recently managed Peugeot's most successful ever email campaign, with click-through rates of 42% for the launch campaign for the Peugeot 308.
The new website, at www.eCRM.co.uk, provides case studies and elaborates on the agency's view that digital agencies will become better placed to manage CRM programmes over the next few years compared with DM agencies simply because they are focused on immediacy of response and cost effectiveness of the channels involved - email, web and mobile.
Underwired is headed up by Felix Velarde and Jason Holland. Felix set up Hyperinteractive in 1994, and with Jason founded Lowe UK's digital arm Head New Media in 1997 and the UK's first iTV specialist HeadEnd Interactive Television in 1998.
Velarde commented, "eCRM has been a clear focus for Underwired since 2003, when we built our own email segmentation software because of a lack of sophisticated enough tools at the time. While the software has now been replaced by a roster of excellent delivery and data partners, we've been building strategic planning, creative and campaign management expertise ever since and today we're doing great work with Virgin (generating long-term ROI of 14:1 to 26:1) and Nickelodeon, and our Peugeot work is starting to gather momentum. We feel it's time we created a separate platform for case studies and our working principles, especially as the threat of recession focuses marketers minds on the most effective marketing channels."
The eCRM site can be found at www.eCRM.co.uk