Official press releases:
PARTNERUP LAUNCHES CUSTOM COMMUNITY SOLUTION FOR TARGETING SMALL BUSINESS CUSTOMERS
New solution enables companies to drive customer acquisition, engagement and retention among small business market
For Release:
On or after Wednesday,June 24, 2009
Contact:
Media Relations
PartnerUp, Inc.
Direct: (651) 787-1280
E-mail: newsroom@partnerup.com
Minneapolis, MN—June 24, 2009— PartnerUp , the first and largest online community geared solely toward small business owners and entrepreneurs and a Deluxe Company (NYSE: DLX), today announced the launch of its Custom Community Solution , a comprehensive, end-to-end marketing engine designed for enterprises seeking to acquire, engage and retain small business customers. Built on PartnerUp’s robust platform, PartnerUp’s Custom Community Solution combines the power of its social networking technologies with the strength of its ad reporting and market research capabilities, to help companies create meaningful customer relationships that generate measurable business results.
“Deluxe acquired PartnerUp because they offered our organization a very powerful set of enterprise tools, including a market research engine, rich customer profiling and a very sophisticated targeting engine for online advertising,” said Lee J. Schram, CEO of Deluxe Corporation. “With PartnerUp’s Custom Community Solution, we are now making these tools available to companies who sell to small business, enabling them to brand their own community to strengthen and extract more value from their customer relationships.”
This news comes on the heels of PartnerUp’s recent partnership announcement with SCORE— a partnership that helps small business owners across America gain immediate and free access to advice, mentoring, and tools for surviving the current recession. SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business,” chose the PartnerUp platform for their community to enable their 11,000 + counselors, who are retired executives and business owners, to expand their reach online. Powered by PartnerUp’s advanced technology, the SCORE Community connects to the main PartnerUp community giving visitors to the SCORE site (SCOREcommunity.org), access to hundreds of thousands of other small businesses who are already networking online.
“PartnerUp’s unique platform has allowed us to harness the power of online communities in ways unimaginable,” said Ken Yancey, CEO of SCORE. “Collaborating with an industry leader like PartnerUp has allowed us to further extend our resources for the small business community, while delivering on our commitment to educating entrepreneurs on how to succeed as a small business owner.”
PartnerUp’s Custom Community Solution offers new tools, including:
- Social Networking Platform — The main functional interface of the online community enables customers to create profiles, network with other members, browse forums, search directories, and more.
- Advertising Targeting and Reporting — Drawing on advanced technology, these tools allow companies to target members based on behavior and profile criteria and view campaign results in real-time.
- Personalization and Profiling — Ability to create a record of a customer’s profile, behavioral activity and needs, to personalize the customer experience on corporate or e-commerce sites.
- Market Intelligence — Cutting-edge market research technology provides valuable, real-time insight into the thought-process, preferences and behaviors of customers. The ability to build custom questionnaires, target specific participants and overlay demographic/firmographic data on top of survey results, enables companies to obtain a complete view of their customer’s mindset.
"We've grown our business by focusing on the needs of our community members," said Steve Nielsen, CEO of PartnerUp. "The introduction of our custom community solution is a natural evolution of this strategy in that it enables other corporations to tap into the power of social networking quickly and demonstrate a strong ROI."
General Availability
PartnerUp’s Custom Community Solution is available immediately. For more information, please visit http://corporate.partnerup.com.
About PartnerUp
PartnerUp is the first and largest online community geared solely toward small business owners and entrepreneurs. PartnerUp was founded in February 2005 and acquired by Deluxe Corporation in July 2008. PartnerUp is headquartered in Minneapolis. For more information, visit http://www.partnerup.com.