Better campaign management with SAS Marketing Optimisation

Predictive analytics can increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by indicating which customers are most likely to respond to specific offers.

That's according to Retha Keyser, product manager at SAS Institute SA, who adds that analytics can also estimate the value of those responses. "Analytics can assist marketers to improve the results of their campaigns by enabling more targeted communication efforts, eliminating duplication and assisting to get the right messages to the right customers," she says.

With the development of new communication channels and technologies, customers are being flooded with more frequent and diverse communications. "So, while companies routinely market to millions of customers through a wide variety of channels, such as e-mail, SMS and brochures, recipients of these campaigns are becoming less tolerant of irrelevant or repetitive communications."

The need to communicate more effectively with customers is also driven by the reality that marketing budgets are under pressure. "A marketing campaign such as a direct mailing exercise is a costly undertaking. Marketers therefore need to know that there is a high probability that the message reaches those customers who are likely to appreciate a specific offer and respond to it, particularly as they are increasingly expected to demonstrate a quantifiable contribution to the organisation's performance and growth," explains Keyser.

However, many marketers lack an effective method for determining which customers should receive which communications, and simple rank ordering does not take budget and channel constraints into consideration. "As a result, financial returns on database marketing continue to fall short of expectations," she says.

And despite the gains in marketing efficiency afforded by the latest campaign management and marketing automation technology, most marketers still have no way to determine the ideal marketing mix for a given campaign or set of campaigns.

SAS has introduced predictive analytics for marketers that equips marketers to make fact-based decisions that consider the trade-offs between a company's capacity to deliver and a customer's willingness to respond. "SAS Marketing Optimisation helps marketers fine-tune their efforts and avoid spending unnecessary resources on redundant communications or the wrong mix of channel support," says Keyser.

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SAS Marketing Optimisation improves effectiveness and profitability in campaign management by evaluating multiple campaigns simultaneously to determine which products should be marketed to individual customers for maximum return.

"As a complement to marketing automation and campaign management technologies, SAS Marketing Optimisation lets marketers plan and prioritise all outbound customer communications to maximise economic returns while balancing the organisation's capacity to deliver and the likelihood each customer will respond," says Keyser.

With this solution, marketers can anticipate the return on campaign activities using a Web-based scenario-planning environment that integrates predictive analytics with constraint-based optimisation.

"By taking all available offers and each customer's expected return per offer into account and analysing the information in the context of business constraints, such as budget limitations and channel capacity, marketers can select the best combination of offers for individual customers. In this way, marketers can be sure that communications are only being delivered to the right customer through the best channel, given the resources available," explains Keyser.

Introducing intelligence into the marketing campaign gives organisations the ability to use their marketing budgets more efficiently and improve channel effectiveness to ensure that inappropriate offers don't reach customers.

Built on SAS's proven analytic technology. SAS Marketing Optimisation combines mathematical optimisation, user-defined constraint modelling and integration with predictive analytics and marketing automation.

SAS Marketing Optimisation is available on its own or as an integrated complement to SAS Marketing Automation, which combines automated business processes with a wide spectrum of analytic techniques and automated campaign management processes to help manage customer communications.