Carlson Wagonlit Travel Helps Franchisees Localize Email Campaigns with ExactTarget's Email Marketing Software

ExactTarget, a provider of easy-to-use email marketing software for permission marketers, announced today that Carlson Wagonlit Travel Associates is equipping its nearly 1,000 U.S. Franchise offices with ExactTarget's ChannelConnect software for fast do-it-yourself creation of graphically rich email campaigns tailored to their local needs.

ChannelConnect is enabling Carlson Wagonlit associates to easily incorporate local promotions, messages from local agents, exact airfares from the local airport, and other local content into customer emails designed and controlled by the franchiser's office. It also is facilitating target marketing to clients with certain demographic profiles and specific interests such as cruises, family vacations or Hawaiian holidays by allowing campaigns to be delivered to segmented customer lists with a few simple commands.

The software has been integrated with Carlson Wagonlit Travel's proprietary Q3 customer database system, allowing customer lists to be extracted from Q3 and inserted into ChannelConnect for email delivery with one click. ChannelConnect then provides email tracking data on customer interests to the Q3 system to help build customer profiles for future list segmentation. This integration between CRM and email marketing systems is a first in the travel industry.

The franchisee rollout of the ExactTarget software follows a successful adoption by Carlson Wagonlit Associates' marketing department, which has been using the system for design, delivery and tracking of email communications to an opt-in list of nearly 90,000 customers since July. The software is enabling Carlson Wagonlit's marketing personnel to handle all email functions without assistance from technical staff, produce email campaigns in just one day, and monitor recipient clickthrough behavior, all at very low cost.

"ExactTarget has dramatically improved our email promotion efforts at the corporate level, and we expect it to do the same for our local agencies," said Roger E. Block, Executive Vice President of Carlson Wagonlit Travel Associate Division. "It fits very well with our focus on target-marketing directly to pre-qualified people. Q3 can tell us the kinds of vacation experiences each of our customers prefer, and ExactTarget can help us get the relevant information to those customers quickly and easily."

ChannelConnect's localization capabilities stem from an exclusive "Lock and Publish" feature allowing local Carlson Wagonlit offices to quickly incorporate the text and images of their choice into corporate templates that "lock" branded content into place for a consistent look and feel. The names, photos and contact information of individual associates can also be dynamically inserted for maximum personalization.

Local affiliates can choose from a comprehensive content library that Carlson Wagonlit's marketing group has assembled for use in ExactTarget emails, ranging from destination photos and generic beach scenes to cruise ship photos, supplier logos and travel-related articles. Carlson Wagonlit associates also have the option to build emails from scratch with ExactTarget's point-and-click design capabilities.

"Carlson Wagonlit Travel is a classic example of the value of our ChannelConnect software for franchises, local company offices and others that need to brand globally and email locally," said Peter McCormick, ExactTarget Vice President of Marketing. "Corporate marketers can deliver branded content with the assurance that it will remain intact, while franchisees can localize the message and even personalize the email. ChannelConnect enables a large company to accomplish true one-to-one marketing."

About ExactTarget
ExactTarget provides powerful and comprehensive email marketing software that makes permission-based email marketing easy for organizations of all sizes and levels of marketing and technology sophistication. ExactTarget?s patent-pending solutions allow users to easily create, deliver and track personalized email messages without technical assistance, utilizing point-and-click wizards and unique localization and personalization options. The privately held company is based in Indianapolis and has more than 1,000 customers around the world.

About Carlson Travel Group
Carlson Travel Group, Inc. is a subsidiary of Minneapolis-based Carlson Companies, Inc. Brands include: Carlson Wagonlit Travel Associates, Cruise Holidays, Results Travel, Carlson Leisure Travel Services and Carlson Destination Marketing Services. In 2002, for the seventh consecutive year, the Carlson Wagonlit Travel Associate program was named the top travel Business Franchise by Entrepreneur's Franchise 500®; franchise Times ranked the program as the 3rd top franchise overall in 2001 and 2002.