The letter was from Dominic Langan, Madison’s commercial director, and the driving force behind Ultimate Pursuits.
Dear Ultimate Pursuits Dealer
Shortly, you shall all be receiving the long awaited Ultimate Pursuits point of sale
pack consisting of leaflets, a leaflet dispenser and window stickers. A personalised
rubber stamp with your web address for use on the back of the leaflets is also on
its way. Whilst it is still clearly very early days for Ultimate Pursuits and although we are
getting encouraging hit and visitor rates we are not getting a high level of order
conversion. We are therefore working on various developments to help address this
issue. In time for the new season, we will be implementing a promotional presence on
your sites using Madison clearance. Whilst having no impact on your margins they
will stimulate purchasing by providing a sale element of "red ticket items". These
will be in the "what’s hot" section, a section for just promo items and in all the
product searches promotional items will always be shown first. Secondly, and again in time for the new season, we will be introducing a mail order
facility allowing for carriage to be charged and for you to forward the goods onto
home/work addresses in traditional internet style. We will continue to ship the
goods to you and the carriage charge, which you can specify, will be passed directly
to you. The consumer has the choice of collecting from your store or paying carriage
for you to ship it onto their chosen address. We are also making further enhancements to the site. During this Autumn we will be
introducing dynamic links from specific products to more detailed product pages. We
will also be linking to specially created brand pages and introducing the “more
info” button by product. Madison has invested a fortune in the creation, management and marketing of Ultimate
Pursuits. The concept adds value on so many levels it is naïve to measure it purely
on order generation. Ultimate Pursuits promotes your business but it is up to you
how much effort you put in to providing us with images and text (some have put in
considerably more effort than others). How many of you have promoted your Ultimate
Pursuits site and have links from your main sites? Ultimate Pursuits provides you
with a fully personalized e-commerce enabled website with over 9000 products in
which you do not have to invest any time in housekeeping, allowing your customers to
browse a huge range of the top brands in cycling and make informed purchasing
decisions, be it in-store or on-line. For 2004 the promotion of Ultimate Pursuits will be intrinsic to all Madison
marketing. Finally, there will be no more charges for Ultimate Pursuits, until we review it
again in twelve months time. There will now be a one off set up cost of just £100
which you have already paid. (If you opted for one of the annual schemes you will be
fully refunded all monies already paid other than the £100 set up fee). Do not underestimate the value of Ultimate Pursuits for your business. With a
massive recruitment drive planned for this Winter, Madison absorbing the cost and
with all the developments listed above, we expect Ultimate Pursuits to unite the
independent bicycle retailer to become the biggest nationwide on-line entity in the
cycle industry. Very exciting stuff! Thank you for your continued and valued support.