In today's marketplace, marketing campaigns must deliver maximum return on increasingly limited investment. To achieve quick time-to-value with minimal technology support, a new Internet-based software solution from SAS, the leader in business analytics, is a fast path to direct marketing success.
SAS Campaign Management, already offered as licensed software or a custom-hosted solution, is adding a pre-configured solution for rapid creation, modification and management of marketing campaigns ranging from simple to sophisticated multi-channel efforts. Marketers can use this software as a service (SaaS) offering to define more targeted segments, employ SAS predictive models to improve response rates, prioritise selection rules, manage multiple channels, automate “lights out” and triggered campaigns, and report on campaign success.
“Delivering our respected campaign management software via SaaS minimises capital expense for resource-challenged businesses. It also allows them to get a campaign up and running quickly and achieve return on investment in minimal time,” said Jeff Levitan, General Manager of SAS' Global Customer and Retail business.
“Marketers can zero in on appropriate segments, retain valuable customers and drive incremental revenue through acquisition, cross-sell and up-sell programs without IT or large infrastructure investments.”
SAS Campaign Management delivered via SaaS provides pre-packaged analytical models to improve customer insights and focus marketing programs on the right customers. Templates, pre-packaged reports and analytics are built in; a Web browser is all that organisations need to manage customer lists and start creating campaigns.
The solution drives smarter, better-targeted and more profitable campaigns. It includes:
* Response models predicting clients' likelihood to accept certain offers.
* Customer segmentation models identifying the most profitable customer segments and opportunities to migrate customers into more profitable segments.
* Campaign checklists showing tasks required to complete any given campaign.
* Approval steps providing necessary checks and balances in the marketing process.
* E-mail notifications alerting users to campaign status.
“SaaS delivery of campaign management, with its predictable and flexible fees, will resonate particularly well among small and midsize B-to-C marketing organisations and B-to-B marketers,” Levitan said. “Campaigns developed with the online solution can range from simple to very complex, from planned marketing programs to opportunistic communications aimed at a precise audience. SAS Campaign Management enables any marketer seeking better results to graphically create and manage multi-channel, multistage campaigns.”
SAS also provides the flexibility to migrate to broader capabilities. If requirements grow over time, businesses can migrate to a more customised hosted solution or to an on-premise implementation.
"Many businesses need the power of a complete campaign management solution but don't have the time, budget or technical resources for an on-premise installation. Software as a service is a great way for them to get started," said David Raab, Principal at Raab Associates, a noted expert in marketing automation and author of the recent book, 'The Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit'.
SAS' new solution is the company's second SaaS offering. In January, SAS Drug Development was announced as a service, and SAS OnDemand for Professional Education was unveiled today. These products are part of the SAS hosted computing strategy, which includes enterprise offerings such as SAS Marketing Automation that provide broader, more customer-specific capabilities than a SaaS product.
SAS announced last week the construction of a new $70 million cloud computing centre at its Cary, North Carolina, headquarters. The new facility will support SaaS and other hosted software offerings, a growth market segment. Today's announcement came at SAS Global Forum, the largest annual SAS users group conference, attended by more than 3 000 business and IT users of SAS software and solutions.
Share