Free e-mail company Juno Online Services L.P. announced this week that Cendant will begin marketing its online shopping club NetMarket (www.netmarket.com) and credit history service PrivacyGuard (www.privacyguard.com) to Juno members. The deal calls for Juno to pitch Cendant's services to Juno's members by e-mail and banner ads.
“This is a new marketing channel that we plan to go after relatively aggressively,” said Chris Jones, spokesman for Cendant, Parsipanny, NJ. “Juno members inherently look for value, and we feel our low-price model is going to allow us to offer Juno members the kind of value they're looking for.”
NetMarket and PrivacyGuard memberships cost $69 and $59 a year respectively. Cendant plans to test various prospecting offers, including a $1-for-the-first-three-months trial offer that the company has used successfully, he said.
Jones would not disclose dollar amounts but said the Juno deal is similar to, though not nearly as big as, the $50 million, three-year cross-promotional deal that CUC International struck last year with America Online before CUC merged with HFS Corp. to become Cendant.
“This deal is similar in the sense that we'll be able to market our products interactively to a motivated group of consumers who are willing to shop and transact online,” Jones said, adding that the AOL deal “has been very profitable for us.”
Bob Cherins, executive vice president at Juno, New York, called the agreement “a dramatic expansion of an existing relationship.” Juno will begin sending test offers to its members on behalf of Cendant in September, he said, and will roll out with the winners in October.
When it launched in April 1996, Juno offered members free e-mail addresses through an advertiser-supported online service but no Internet access beyond text only e-mail message transmission and retrieval. Recently, Juno began marketing Internet access to its membership, which the company pegs at 5.6 million. Cherins declined to say how many members have converted to paying Web-surfers as a result of the month-old effort.
Advertisers on Juno's service have three options: run-of-service advertising, advertising aimed at one of 10 broadly defined segments (such as families, business users, seniors and travel) and custom-targeted advertising.
Custom-targeted advertising is available by selecting segments of Juno's database using any combination of demographic and psychographic characteristics the company gathers through a 20-question subscriber survey.
Juno's advertisers include American Express, Delta Airlines, IBM, Intel, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Procter & Gamble. Juno executives say the company will have 10 million subscribers by the end of 1999.
— Ken Magill
