Aris Completes CRM Project for Ministry of Sound

Aris, a leading provider of IT services including consulting, training and software, has successfully completed a customer relationship management (CRM) project for the Ministry of Sound, a world-recognised youth culture brand encompassing Internet, recordings, clothing, touring and media. To build powerful on-line marketing tools, Aris worked with MoS' marketing team to create a custom-built, personalised e-mail system to deliver e-mail marketing campaigns, collate responses and gather demographic and profiling information that can be built into a database of registered customer details.

The profiling information is now used to promote all areas of the Ministry of Sound business, including the Website via the delivery of 100,000 weekly "e- flyers" as well as ad-hoc targeted promotions - called "e-bombs" - to segments of the database.

Paul Trendall, Aris Marketing Director, said "Ministry of Sound wanted to develop and manage its on-line relationships with its customers. This mirrors Aris' vision - called interactive Enterprise Relationship Management - (iERM) of how organizations will communicate interactively and effectively with their stakeholders, including customers. Aris enabled the Web site to take in user details unobtrusively and build a customer profile synchronised across the organisation. Our know-how has created a scalable solution that can handle the demand from the 380,000 current registered users of the MoS Web site."

James Baccus, Chief Technology Officer for Ministry of Sound, said "Ministry of Sound wanted a system for promoting itself through e-mail and profiling our users. Given the extremely high return rate we are getting for the promotions, combined with the money we are saving and the better service we're giving to our users, this implementation has been truly successful."

Microsoft's SiteServer was used in conjunction with a SQL server database to build the additional functionality required, including user registration, competition voting, and data synchronisation. SiteServer also enables 'intelligent' data capture - discreet, relevant, 'once-only' questions to build user profiles on all registered users. The challenges to Aris' consultants included the size of distribution lists, the integration of the new components into an existing Web site with minimal disruption, and the need to make the request for information as unobtrusive as possible within the existing Web site format.

The implementation created by Aris gives Ministry of Sound much greater control over its mailing without the cost of using a third party to perform the mailing. More importantly, user registration on the site means Ministry of Sound can offer premium content areas, scaling up to pay-per-view and e- commerce facilities. The restructuring of the site infrastructure also gives the site added scalability to accommodate additional users in the future. The Ministry of Sound Web site can be found at www.ministryofsound.co.uk/.

About Aris

Aris provides enterprise IT solutions comprising consulting, training and software services, to help organisations improve their operations and their competitive position through the use of leading-edge technologies and the Web. Aris currently has over 900 employees in 11 cities throughout the United States and United Kingdom. Aris is an accredited Microsoft Solution Provider Partner, Microsoft Developer Service Company, Lotus Premium Partner and Oracle Business Alliance Partner. The company's headquarters are based in Bellevue, WA in the USA and in Oxford in the UK. Aris Offices can be found at Birmingham, Oxford, London and Reading in the UK and at sites across the USA. It also has an office in Heidelberg, Germany. Aris UK has ISO 9001 accreditation.