SAS Marketing Automation set to maximise customer profits

It takes more than good products and services for businesses to succeed today. Many are faced with more competitors than ever, each just as dedicated to holding on to existing customers and winning new ones. To come out on top, organisations have to meet customers' unique needs better than the competition.

To do this, businesses today must know their customers better and communicate with them more effectively than anyone else. The best way of achieving this is to use sophisticated marketing automation technology.

"Not only does it help organisations to properly target their marketing communications, it also enables the marketing people to do it themselves," says Carol Carlton, senior business solutions consultant: Marketing Automation, SAS Institute, leaders in business intelligence. "This frees up IT resources, while placing the power and control in the hands of the marketing experts."

According to Carlton, marketing campaigns need to be faster, smarter and more profitable than ever before. This means multi-channel customer data must be transformed into a single, comprehensive customer view that serves as the foundation for all marketing initiatives.

That's when Marketing Automation technology comes in. It lets a business integrate and analyse customer data from every contact point, including call centres, mail, person-to-person, fax and the Web. The resulting accurate, consistent view of the customer can then be incorporated into marketing campaigns.

"As a result, businesses can improve customer retention, anticipate customer needs and identify opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell," says Carlton. "Leading industry solutions, like SAS Marketing Automation, enable businesses to maximise revenue, personalise campaign messages and offers, as well as gain a clearer understanding of customer segments and customer profitability."

The SAS Marketing Automation suite is the only solution that combines award-winning data warehousing and data mining with state-of-the-art campaign management. It allows businesses to plan and manage every aspect of even the most complex, multi-level, multi-channel campaigns, from the desktop.

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The solution enables businesses to measure the return on each campaign, learn from the results, and improve the next one. They can target communications at either individuals or households, and apply intelligent rules to identify the right person in each household to receive a particular offer. Similarly they can optimise over a number of customer accounts held by one individual to decide which particular account the customer should be communicated because of.

"It can schedule key campaign activities and automatically initiate regular communications at the required frequency," says Carlton. "It can also be used to manage communications resulting from inbound customer activity over multiple channels including traditional and digital media."

Using the SAS Marketing Automation suite, users can painlessly build predictive models and then the marketing team can combine these model results with other database criteria for more customer-targeted communications than achievable with rule-based approaches. The solution automatically updates model results for any changes to customer behaviour, ensuring that predicted outcomes always reflect the latest information. It also runs all analysis, predictive modelling and customer communication activity from a single business solution suite.

According to Carlton, although an organisation requires a data warehouse populated with quality data to do sophisticated marketing automation, businesses can still get good results if they implement marketing automation technology before the analysis and reporting capabilities are properly in place.

"Businesses can start at a basic level and work up from there," she says. "We have seen companies achieve real benefits without having a complete foundation in place."

And because marketing automation is essentially about communicating with customers, it can be used for areas other than marketing campaigns. At least one customer is using SAS Marketing Automation for debt collection.