Left: Andy Huggins - Managing Director, Rocket Marketing Group. Right: Alan Saunders - Operations & Marketing Director, Rocket Marketing Group.

The Rocket Marketing Group has worked with sit-up channels since July 2006 when they signed their first agreement to provide discount and benefits membership programmes for sit-up channels’ customers. sit-up channels has successfully gained incremental revenue from the sale of these discount and benefits membership programmes to its consumers. Now three and a half years later sit-up channels are extending their agreement with The Rocket Marketing Group to be the sole provider of discount and benefits membership programmes for a further three years. (more…)

The Rocket Marketing Group will now be offering their exclusive Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card on PeopleValue’s Advantage website. PeopleValue delivers employee benefit programmes to a diverse range of organisations.

This new offer gives employees who use PeopleValue, the opportunity to purchase the Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card and enjoy two rentals for the price of one, an unlimited amount of times, for a year. The Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card offers a fantastic opportunity for employees that use PeopleValue to enjoy great entertainment more often. (more…)

As published in The Argus, Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Rocket Marketing Group has recruited Perfect Pizza to their loyalty membership programmes, offering a Buy One Get One Free deal.

This Buy One Get One Free at Perfect Pizza offer fits perfectly with Rocket’s Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card. Rocket will promote these complementing offers as the perfect night in, to members of its loyalty and membership programmes. Both the Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card and Buy One Get One Free with Perfect Pizza are available to use anytime, as often as members like, on the full ranges, so will help members to enjoy their ‘Appetite for Entertainment’, whatever their lifestyle.

Please contact us if you are interested in any of these offers.

Terms and conditions apply. See www.theentertainmentclub.co.uk for details.

The Rocket Marketing Group creates loyalty and membership programmes which offer discounts on major brands, to its members. The company has enjoyed huge growth over the last 3 years, and has gone from employing 12 members of staff to over 50, across all areas of the business including call centre, fulfillment, technical, marketing and creative.

Rocket has also increased the variety of loyalty and membership programmes it offers, working with new key clients and partners. The company now operates 7 clubs and a number of great rewards such as the exclusive Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card, giving more and more members fantastic discounts on their favourite brands. The range of clubs include The Home & Garden Club, The Entertainment Club, The 241 Hotel Club, The Big Savings Club, The JML VIP Club, plus more on the horizon.

Alan Saunders, Operations and Business Development Director comments: “We have always believed in the importance of quality and this is what Rocket’s products and service have been built on. Our discount clubs offer consumers great value for money, clients a fantastic marketing opportunity and partners incredible incremental revenue. It is great to see that all of our hard work, attention to detail and quality is paying off. I look forward to Rocket’s bright future, having now established itself as a leader in the field of Sales Promotion.”

Rocket looks forward to a great 2010 and growing the business even further.

This timeline charts Rocket’s milestones over the last 3 years:

July 2006 Sign Agreements with sit-up.tv

October 2006 Alan Saunders joins Board as Operations & Business  Development Director

January 2007 Rebrand as Rocket Marketing Group & set growth strategies

February 2007 Become members of the Direct Marketing Association

March 2007 Introduction of AVAYA IP Office Telephone System

April 2007 Introduction of SAP Business One CRM and Business Management

April 2007 Become members of the Institute of Sales Promotion

May 2007 Launched The Entertainment Club

July 2007 Launched The Midweek Dining Club with Tio Pepe

August 2007 Moved Head Office to Enterprise Point to expand & allow further growth

January 2008 Sign Agreements with HSBC for new Merchant Services Facilities

June 2008 Accredited by British Standards Institute as ISO:9001 Quality Assured

August 2008 Sign Agreements with JML, and develop our first white-label product, the JML VIP Savings Club

October 2008 Launched The Home & Garden Club with HBOS

November 2008 Established Rocket Rewards to own and manage our own stand alone promotions

January 2009 Sign Agreements with New Image TV to market the Big Savings Club

February 2009 Sign Agreements with Guthy-Renker to market the Big Savings Club

June 2009 Expand offices and create a Marketing Suite

July 2009 Welcome Ashley Faull to the board

August 2009 Sign Agreements with Blockbuster. Conception of and Exclusive rights for a new product the Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card

August 2009 Started selling The Home & Garden Club with sit-up.tv

August 2009 Sign Agreements with Flying Brands to market The Home & Garden Club

September 2009 Sign Agreements with iSUBSCRiBE, to develop and manage Rocket’s first online club

October 2009 Launched the 241 Hotel Club

November 2009 Sign Agreements with Harvest Media & Virgin Media

November 2009 Create and launch The Living VIP Club

November 2009 Reached over 50 staff

December 2009 Joined Brighton Chamber of Commerce

Contact Us for information on sales promotion and implementing a discount for your brand or reward for your customers. We operate a number of loyalty and membership programmes that offer members discounts, giving the brand access to a large membership base of loyal customers. This helps businesses to drive loyalty retention and revenue.

The Wise Marketer recently reported the rise in coalition marketing as a sales promotion technique. Sales promotion has become more prominent in the last year in a blanket effort to get people  to spend their money less cautiously. It has become important to reward consumers for their loyalty so that they continue to spend money at a time when people are trying to cut back. Encouraging reluctant consumers to spend money continues to be the number one priority for brands at the moment and sales promotion is a proven way to do this. We are at the point where now it is an essential tool to remain competitive, particularly on price.

Sales promotion through consumer incentives and brand coalition is not a new or reactionary concept dreamt up as a recession solution. This has long been the bread and butter of companies such as The Rocket Marketing Group who put companies together in loyalty and membership programmes/ discount clubs and create rewards for staff or consumer incentives. The lure of big brands working together can be a powerful solution for potential rewards and an attractive consumer incentive whatever the state of the economy. All the current climate has done is to highlight the importance of sales promotion to consumers, making it now essential for all brands.

The ideas of brand coalition are the principles that loyalty and rewards programmes or discount clubs and consumer incentive rewards were built on. With loyalty and membership programmes/ discount clubs a member joins a club and then becomes eligible to redeem discounts at various retailers. The joint venture of big and small brands work to validate each other and produce a community of customer centric brands that members become loyal to because they can rely on them to understand their needs/ interests. These loyalty and membership programmes or discount clubs can be categorised to target certain markets such as entertainment, home & garden or white-labelled to match particular brands who want to sell the clubs as non-core products and earn incremental revenue.

The idea of high profile sales promotion has now become an integral part of the consumer shopping experience, so it likely to continue in some guise or other even as the economy improves.

Contact Us to discuss the possibilities of developing consumer incentives and brand coalition solutions through loyalty and membership programmes or discount club for your brand.

The Rocket Marketing Group has produced an exclusive offer for the Natwest bank. Customers of this popular bank can now buy the Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card for only £19.99. With this special price, Natwest customers could save money on Blu-ray, DVD and game rentals, anytime and for an unlimited number of uses for 12 months.

This fantastic offer is being featured in the Natwest Sense Magazine from November 2009 to January 2010. Sense magazine has a circulation of over a million copies and so offers a great opportunity. This is the first time the Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card has been sold directly to consumers, but it has proved to be very popular with members of The Rocket Marketing Group’s loyalty and membership programmes.

Contact Us for more information about the Blockbuster 2 for 1 Movie & Game Rental Card.

As we approach Christmas and the new year comes ever closer, retailers’ attentions whilst fixed on the issues of Christmas revenue, are also looking at the changes that are due in the new year. The lower VAT rate of 15% will rise again to 17.5% little over a year after it was lowered. Will this encourage consumers to spend more money before the prices go up again, or will they even notice a difference? Sales figures have been up on the same period last year but surely has more to do with the rise in consumer confidence. The Nationwide’s Consumer Confidence Index shows that there was no improvement last month in consumer confidence but the previous months’ increases have meant that year on year the increase has been significant. There does seem to be hope on the horizon as other major economies have recently exited the recession and companies such as Sainsbury’s and many more are reporting higher profits once again.

It’s hard to tell if the VAT reduction has really drastically changed things for consumers or businesses. To consumers it seems to have been more of a gesture, as on small every day purchases the 2.5% only equates to pennies. In general consumers have been responding positively to sales promotion techniques – many not leaving the home without a voucher or their loyalty and membership programme or discount club guide in hand. From a consumers’ point of view the discounts found in in-store sales, loyalty and membership programmes or discount clubs usually offer far more value than 2.5% and so eclipse the good of the VAT reduction. These discounts can knock profits but also generate loyalty, retention and even revenue if businesses sell the loyalty and membership programmes or discount clubs to its existing customers.

It could be argued that traditional sales promotion techniques have done more in the last year to promote consumer spending than the lower VAT rate. A discount or reward is something that consumers instantly recognise as value for money and can put into context. By employing sales promotion techniques a lot of businesses have managed to stay competitive during difficult times. As the sales and discounts continue into the new year it’s debatable whether consumers or even retailers will notice a massive difference when the VAT increases to 17.5% again.

Contact Us for information on sales promotion and implementing a discount for your brand or reward for your customers. We operate a number of membership and loyalty programmes that offer members discounts, giving the brand access to a large membership base of loyal customers. This helps businesses to drive loyalty retention and revenue.

Earning incremental revenue from an external source can be seen to be a vital element for any business in the current climate. The recession in many cases is responsible for cutting businesses’ potential earnings from their core products/ services, to a minimum. In a recession that is as deep as the current one, the need to resuscitate business incomings is vital. So in many cases, to maintain a healthy profit margin companies have been looking to expand their current consumer offering.

One such way to introduce an extra incremental revenue source is to work with an external company offering additional products/ services under the umbrella of your brand. By upselling other products such as a loyalty and membership programme or discount club to existing customers there is the potential to encourage them to spend more at the point of purchase.

If this product is tailored to the existing customer’s interests in relation to the business’ products, the success rate is likely to be higher. For example, The Rocket Marketing Group operates the JML VIP Savings Club – a loyalty and membership programme/ discount club, which focuses on Entertainment, Fashion and High Street, Health and Leisure, Freedom to Shop, Travel, Toddler and Baby, Motoring, plus 10% off JML’s entire range of time-saving ideas. These sections reflect, complement and expand on JML’s existing products. The Club is then offered to customers when they call the company to order one of JML’s core products. This not only gives JML a second chance to upsell, but it gives them the opportunity to offer non-core product/ services, enhancing their consumer offering.

This model can be applied to a number of companies, whatever the core products/ services are. When the non-core products are offered through an external agency a range of existing clients can be put together to create a loyalty and membership programme or discount club suitable for the brand’s target market.

There are a number of ways to create incremental revenue and should all be seriously considered by companies who don’t want to rely on the revenue generated through their core products/ services or resign themselves to consolidating the business during tough times.

Contact Us if you are interested in earning incremental revenue and driving customer retention through a loyalty and membership programme or discount club.

In Britain we are currently experiencing the longest recession since records began and it is becoming increasingly hard for some businesses to continue trading. Retailers have been using numerous sales promotion tactics – encouraging consumers to spend money by offering discounts and rewards to customers who shop with their brand. With Halloween and bonfire night just passed and Christmas plus New Year on the horizon, there are many marketing and sales promotion opportunities coming along, perfect for targeting customer retention. But how valuable is it to offer seasonal discounts and what are the best ways to distribute them to the kind of customers who are likely to respond?

The changing seasons and special events such as Halloween and Christmas give consumers a reason to spend money. In the current economic climate consumers have become more cautious about spending money – often only buying the things they need. So the job of businesses and marketers is to make sure that their product is seen as a necessity. This is why seasonal discounts can work – it is seen as a special, limited time deal that everyone should get into the spirit of. The deal gives consumers the excuse they want and the sense of urgency needed to prompt an impulse purchase.

There are many reasons people respond to seasonal discounts, mainly using it as an excuse to treat themselves as well as others or merely trying to wait until the best deal is available. The element that all these reasons have in common is that the consumer is responding to a prompt – giving them permission to make a purchase even though times might be hard. These purchases range from the smallest of knick-knacks to big purchases such as furniture or electrical goods, so any retailer can benefit, given the right marketing strategy. By becoming a port of call for a seasonal discount this then showcases your complete consumer offering and encourages customer retention.

To make your seasonal offer work and ensure your message reaches a responsive audience your business needs to sufficiently highlight the seasonal discounts. This also gives you a reason to refresh your customer communications, giving them a new reason to listen to what you are selling and highlighting the brand benefits. This process should start before the event. By having a run up to an event and renewing the message as the days countdown, it gives consumers the chance to engage with the offer and consider using it.

It is also good to draw consumers in to the fun element of the season or event so they are engaging with your brand on a social level. Show insights into their lifestyle and be seen to offer to help them out with your products/ services. For example how about suggesting gift ideas at Christmas, costume ideas at Halloween or ideas for keeping kids entertained during the summer holidays? The value is in knowing your customer then showing that you understand their mindset and offering them what they want in a way that is mutually beneficial.

As well as in-store and point of purchase offers you can also offer a saving and subsequently a seasonal discount through a third party agency. There are a number of sales promotion agencies that have a substantial loyal customer base to who you can offer your discount to. The special offer you offer will then be distributed to the established customer base who respond to discounts and seasonal discount through regular e-shots, driving customer retention.

There are definitely benefits in offering seasonal discounts and some would even argue that they are still essential for retailers in the run up to Christmas, but as with anything it is essential that they are managed properly to get the best results.

Contact Us if you would like to discuss the customer retention and sales promotion opportunities for your business, by creating an exclusive discount, reward or seasonal discount for a loyalty and membership programme/ discount club.