smartFOCUS’s flagship products to deliver targeted marketing campaigns for leading car distributor

Bristol, UK – 6 October 2008 – smartFOCUS, the international multi-channel marketing software company, is providing I.M. Group, a UK-based European automotive importer and service provider, with a consolidated solution to build a core customer database to help strengthen the brand relationships that customers and dealers have with its partners including Subaru, Daihatsu and Isuzu.

Now trading for over 30 years, I.M. Group is an international distributor – importing cars into the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia.  To enable further global expansion, I.M. Group recognised the need for a stronger CRM system for dealer-based lead generation and online marketing activity, as existing marketing campaigns were time consuming and inconsistent.

Combining the strengths of smartANALYZER and smartREPORTER will give the marketers at I.M. Group the capability to probe and segment marketing data at their desktop, conduct “hands-on” analysis, and create sophisticated reports.  Both systems are designed to enable marketers to analyse large volumes of customer, product and transactional data.  This will allow complex data to be easily analysed and generate summaries with the high speed, high-volume data server optimised for marketing data analytics.

I.M. Group will now be able to plan and tailor campaigns across the regions that it operates in and create more targeted campaigns that will increase the number of responses.  The improved customer relationship management will also result in a better overall experience for its customers by creating highly focused campaigns, resulting in less ‘redundant’ correspondence and strengthening key relationships.

Andrew Edmiston, Managing Director of I.M. Group said: “The automotive sector is extremely competitive and as a niche player it is vital that we continually find new ways to better understand our market.  Having more sophisticated marketing analysis which explores how I.M. Group’s customers behave will allow us to grow our business in a manner that is driven by customers and not the other way around.  We chose smartFOCUS because of its impressive track record of being able to deliver complex integrated customer centric solutions to budget and timescale and having a solution that will help us to further add value to our customer relationships”.

European Sales Director at smartFOCUS, Steve Klin added: “With its plans for growth, it is crucial for I.M. Group that it operates with a single customer view and is able to efficiently manage and measure marketing effectiveness.  It is fantastic for smartFOCUS to add I.M. Group to our extensive customer base and we look forward to fostering a strong ongoing relationship.”

About I.M. Group
I. M. Group is a privately owned company with more than 30 years' experience in the automotive industry. Constantly expanding, the Group currently has the UK franchises for the Japanese marques of Subaru, Isuzu and Daihatsu.

Based in Coleshill near Birmingham, the Group also imports into Scandinavia, the Baltic States and Eire and has a turnover in excess of £400m which includes I.M. Properties - a highly successful business which specialises in commercial properties.