SAS Marketing Automation extends analytics to desktop of marketing business analysts

According to the AMR Research Alert, 2 April 2003, "only 16% of CRM users can quantify value because the tools are still far too difficult to use". In addition, the Alert reports that users of CRM applications now include "management, knowledge workers and less technology savvy field personnel".

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced that SAS Marketing Automation 3.1 will put the power of its analytics into the hands of the marketing business analysts or segment managers without a statistical background.

With SAS Marketing Automation 3.1, marketers can leverage the world's premier analytic software to design campaigns through a Web browser without sacrificing any functionality. This solution will support the entire marketing team, including marketing business analysts, database marketers, quantitative analysts and IT, at every stage of the marketing process, making the creation of targeted and profitable customer communications easier than ever before.

Companies are maturing in their approach to managing customer relationships by focusing their strategies by segments rather than focusing on strategies by product. Marketers can now define customer segments and target audience definitions using the combination of analytic techniques, business rules and visualisation in a wizard-driven environment. SAS Marketing Automation 3.1 provides marketing business analysts, who are not typically statistical experts, with the highest analytical horsepower available, combining descriptive and predictive analytic techniques and presenting them in a business context.

"It became apparent that extending the analytical capabilities of our marketing automation product to the desktop of marketing business analysts would dramatically increase the efficiency, and therefore profitability, of a company," said Jim Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS.

"SAS Marketing Automation 3.1 includes an easy-to-use Web interface and wizard-driven functions that put marketers in control of creating targeted segments and customer profiles, as well as designing marketing communications. This user-friendly environment builds on the analytical depth that SAS is known for. In addition, we realise that people from different departments all touch the planning and execution of a successful marketing campaign. Version 3.1 will address each group's individual needs and make it easier to work together by enabling cross-functional cooperation."

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"SAS has a breadth and depth of sophisticated analytics that allow organisations to gain better insight into their customer relationships," said Bob Blumstein, director of research for CRM Analytics and Marketing Applications at IDC Research. "With SAS Marketing Automation 3.1 they have brought power from their analytics to the marketing business analyst. With this interface, SAS Marketing Automation users will not only be able to easily create segments, but also understand what data are most predictive and important to the management of segments."

"Our competitors try to pigeon-hole SAS as a bunch of statistical tools that only PhDs can use," said Davis. "They just don't seem to be able to get their arms around the idea that the traditional power and breadth of SAS can be extended to the desktop of the marketing business analyst. But it can and is, and with no detrimental impact on the functionality or accuracy of the results. Marketing business analysts need no knowledge of statistics or programming, they just need to be able to open a Web browser, point a mouse and they can use analytic models to produce results that are still as powerful and useful as ever before."

Additionally, SAS Marketing Automation is the only solution on the market to create a dynamic picture of customers that change as they move through their life cycles. Establishing a customer in a segment at a particular point in time is important, but long-term benefit is derived from managing the whole customer life cycle over time as they change segments. The SAS segmentation management application included in SAS Marketing Automation 3.1 permits the marketer to visually track segments over time to provide an understanding of how certain actions, such as changes in market conditions, life events, or marketing campaigns, have an impact on customer migration through segments. This knowledge helps the marketer track past behaviour, predict future behaviour and respond to changes to manage customer interactions more effectively, thus maximising lifetime profitability.

The announcement of the release of SAS Marketing Automation 3.1 was made at the 21st annual SAS European Users Group International conference, attended by thousands of SAS customers and staff from around the world.