Rank Group

Entertainment company Rank Group is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. The ￡568m turnover group has focussed on the leisure industries of gaming and betting since 2006, and its brands include Grosvenor Casinos and Mecca Bingo. Rank has more than 2.5m customers who make more than 22.5m annual customer visits to its businesses, which also include operations in Spain and Belgium and online offering Rank Interactive. Head of customer communications David Bealing explains the group’s use of cross-media techniques:

What sort of cross-media techniques have you been using?
"Across both Mecca and Grosvenor Casinos brands we have created customised, trigger-based CRM campaigns, utilising all forms of cross-media through our best-in-class Web2Media platform."

How did you find the right supplier to meet your needs?
"After scoping across the Rank Groups brands stakeholders we issued a tight, concise and stretching brief. After shortlist and pitches, Inc Direct were the supplier that was able to meet the business requirements and build the solution from the ground up in a short time frame. We particularly liked Inc Direct’s ‘added value’ providing additional best-practice ideas and insight to supplement our existing strategy."

Are you finding any specific combination(s) of techniques to be particularly effective?
"Good old-fashioned (but highly customised) direct mail continues to deliver strong result for us. However the triggering of email and SMS is also working well for some customer segments."

What difference has it made to your business?
"Having the ability to create highly variable cross-media via our Web2Media tool has increased customer uptake, reduced costs, improved our speed to market and, most importantly, increased our ROI."

Are there other techniques you intend to use in future?
"For us, the future (well it’s already started) is all about much greater segmentation of customer data and making sure we can add actual or perceived value to our customers by deploying segmentation across all cross-media channels."