MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Oct. 9, 2003-- Digital River, Inc. (Nasdaq:DRIV), a global leader in e-commerce outsourcing, today announced the winners of its 2003 ICE Awards for Internet Commerce Excellence. The winning companies were honored last night at a ceremony held in conjunction with Digital River's Network Summit conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Digital River presented awards in four categories to client companies putting e-commerce best practices to work in creative new ways to drive revenue and efficiencies through their online stores. The winners include:
-- McAfee Security, a division of Network Associates Inc., for Best International E-Commerce Strategy;
-- Aladdin Systems, Inc. and Best Software for Best Network Marketing Campaign;
-- BioNet Systems, LLC and ScanSoft, Inc. for Best Product Launch; and
-- Big Hammer, LLC and Symantec Corp. for Best Promotional Performance.
"We are pleased to recognize these companies for their e-commerce leadership and impressive use of e-commerce best practices," said Joel Ronning, Digital River's CEO. "They are actively leveraging the power of the Internet to not only open new business channels, but also pursue creative online sales and marketing opportunities that consistently drive revenues. Their online businesses have generated impressive results and are realizing the benefits of successfully expanding into international markets, establishing third-party relationships, developing integrated and sophisticated marketing campaigns, and capitalizing on operational efficiencies."
Each of Digital River's award winners submitted entries, which summarized the e-commerce best-practice campaigns they implemented and the results they generated by marketing and selling products in their online stores:
-- Best International E-Commerce Strategy
-- McAfee Security - "We needed to expand and localize our e-commerce sites to more aggressively grow our international presence and sales because online shoppers are growing more savvy and their expectations for personalization are rising," said Tobias la Cour, head of EMEA consumer marketing for McAfee Security. "By leveraging Digital River's e-commerce expertise and established technology infrastructure, we more than doubled our online store count, adding six new fully-localized international stores to our existing four sites in just 60 days. During the subsequent four months, our new online stores generated more than 13 percent of our total international sales." Today, McAfee, a world leading supplier of Internet security software for consumers and home office users, is running localized sites for customers in the Asia Pacific, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Scandinavia, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and United States.
-- Best Network Marketing Campaign
-- Aladdin Systems, Inc. - "Drawing from Digital River's global online distribution network of 34,000 companies, we've established important third-party co-marketing relationships and generated an infinite number of reasons to converse with customers," said Jonathan Kahn, Aladdin's president and CEO. "Through our network relationships, we've significantly expanded our market reach, offered our customers a wider variety of software titles and created more attractive promotions. During the second quarter alone, our network marketing efforts earned us more than $1 million in gross sales." Aladdin develops and publishes award-winning business and consumer products, such as StuffIt.
-- Best Software - "Working through Digital River's e-commerce network we developed a relationship with another Digital River software vendor and subsequently launched a joint e-marketing plan that paired our ACT! 6.0 software with a complementary ACT! add-on partner product. The unique product combination drove more than 250 incremental product units through our online store in one day," said Michael Zavala, Best Software's director of ACT! e-commerce and distribution sales. "Evaluating and choosing key partners is important. The breadth and depth of Digital River's e-commerce network makes this process efficient and, in the end, profitable for all companies involved. Digital River's network has not only offered us and our partners access to new markets and revenue opportunities, but also provided our growing customer base with an expanded selection of software titles." Best Software, publishers of both ACT! and Peachtree software, offers leading business management products and services to more than 1.7 million customers in North America.
-- Best Product Launch
-- BioNet Systems, LLC - "With the help of Digital River's account managers and e-marketing tools, we successfully executed a fully integrated online and offline product launch that attracted online shoppers via many ports of entry, stimulated sales and generated results that far exceeded our expectation," said Andrew Tull, BioNet Systems' executive vice president of sales and marketing. "In just six weeks, our multi-faceted campaign drove gross product revenue for our Chat Monitor software to more than 50 percent of the total year-to-date revenue of another one of our popular software titles." BioNet Systems' campaign included extensive cross selling, a diversified e-mail campaign with third-party incentives, home page pop-up ads, affiliate promotions, a press release, and a limited-time, storewide discount. BioNet Systems is the maker of NetNanny(R), a trusted name in Internet safety software for families.
-- ScanSoft, Inc. - "With diligent pre-planning, we simultaneously and successfully executed two multi-faceted online software launches earlier this year," said Ed McGuiggan, ScanSoft's director of e-commerce. "By working as a team with Digital River, we created excitement around our products and their new features, as well as increased efficiencies and our bottom line. Our e-mail launches lasted only 30 days, yet exceeded expectations and yielded significant results for our company." ScanSoft's launch included a combination of e-mail and direct mail and leveraged third-party partnerships established through Digital River's e-commerce network of 34,000 companies. ScanSoft is a leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions.
-- Best Promotional Performance
-- Big Hammer, LLC - "The lesson we learned after successfully outsourcing our e-commerce operations to Digital River was that you shouldn't necessarily do everything yourself just because you are able to," said Judy Millheam, Big Hammer's manager of marketing communications. "With Digital River's help and its e-marketing tool chest, we created a multi-dimensional online promotion to increase traffic to our online store as well as exposure for our Big Hammer software. The end result was a 20,000 percent increase in sales year-over-year. This incredible growth was fueled by incremental software sales running through online stores of home improvement retailers, third-party promotions that leveraged Digital River's e-commerce network, pay-per-click advertising, and a new digital download option." Today, over 80 percent of Big Hammer's online sales are digitally downloaded. Big Hammer develops software to help its do-it-yourself customers design and build their own home improvement projects.
-- Symantec Corp. - "Tapping Digital River's e-marketing expertise to run promotions across all of our sites has helped us proactively generate incremental revenue," said Karen Miller, Symantec's director of global online sales. "To help simplify our customers' product decisions, we placed localized, easy-to-understand product selectors containing product information in audio and visual formats on the home pages of six of our international online stores. Since they were launched in April, the selectors have helped us improve our close ratios and increase our average order values." Symantec is the world leader in Internet security.
About Digital River, Inc.
Digital River, Inc., a global leader in e-commerce outsourcing, builds and manages online businesses for nearly 34,000 companies worldwide. Its e-commerce solution and infrastructure are designed to help companies of all sizes maximize online revenues as well as cut the costs and reduce the risks associated with running an e-commerce operation. The Digital River(R) international e-commerce suite includes site development and hosting, order management, fraud prevention, site merchandising, reporting and analytics, product fulfillment, e-marketing and multi-lingual customer service. Digital River's clients include 3M, ACT!, Autodesk, H&R Block, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Motorola, Novell, Staples.com and Symantec.
Founded in 1994, Digital River is headquartered in Minneapolis with offices throughout the United States and in Europe. For more details about Digital River, visit the corporate Web site at www.digitalriver.com or call 952-253-1234.
Digital River is a registered trademark of Digital River, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks, registrations or copyrights of their respective owners.
