SAS Marketing Optimisation next step in evolution of database marketing

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced SAS Marketing Optimisation, a new solution designed to enable direct marketers to improve their campaign management processes. With this solution, marketers can reach for the next level of effectiveness and profitability by evaluating multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously to optimise, for any given mix of campaigns, which products should be marketed to individual customers to maximise ROI.

Without an effective process for governing contact strategy across numerous marketing campaigns, organisations have no clear way to ensure that various campaign managers aren't targeting the same valued customers. The result may be that customers are over-solicited and become apathetic or even hostile to multiple marketing communications from the same company.

SAS Marketing Optimisation can be deployed to optimise all outbound marketing communications across all channels so that each individual customer is targeted for the best message while simultaneously taking into account channel availability, communication costs, contact policies and other business constraints.

SAS Marketing Optimisation is the only solution that combines mathematical optimisation, user-defined constraint modelling and integration with the leading analytic customer relationship management (CRM) solution for predictive analytics and marketing automation. Using SAS Marketing Optimisation, marketers can develop multiple optimisation scenarios and view predefined reports and graphics to understand the economic impact of different contact policies, channels and offer constraints before campaigns are executed. SAS is the only vendor that offers marketing optimisation as an integrated part of a start-to-finish solution for designing and executing marketing campaigns.

SAS uses an advanced methodology for optimising marketing communications instead of the standard rules-based approach. SAS Marketing Optimisation mathematically takes into account all potential offers across resource constraints, such as budget and call centre capacity, to select the best combination of offers for individual customers. The rules-based approach, which most vendors offer for marketing optimisation, uses the general rule of presenting the best customer with the highest offer - an optimisation method that commonly delivers lower overall profits than using the mathematical approach.

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"Customers are extremely concerned with optimising budgets and marketing spend," said Liz Roche, Vice-President, Meta Group. "Technologies that can enable optimisation by providing mathematically derived recommendations on how to maximise customer interactions, taking into account all constraints, will allow companies to make more effective, fact-based decisions about their marketing initiatives."

Ultimately, SAS Marketing Optimisation offers marketing executives more effective control over their campaigns. "SAS Marketing Optimisation lets you look at the forest of possible customer/offer combinations while ensuring that you nurture each customer with your available resources," said Ken Player, SAS manager of marketing optimisation. "This solution is a natural fit for those organisations that have developed predictive modelling competencies and conduct frequent campaigns to a large customer base."

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