Download How can marketing ensure that it always takes the best action

CROSS-INDUSTRY • SOLUTION BRIEF
How can marketing ensure that it always takes the best action
to achieve organizational goals while meeting customer needs?
Business Impact
“The difference for the campaign team
is night and day. We are able to turn
around programs much more quickly. A
campaign takes four days to pull together
versus 30 days prior to using SAS. This
has allowed the team to create more
targeted campaigns.”
Gary King
Chief Information Officer, Chico’s
Challenges
• Inertia. Companies are not equipped
for increasingly digital customer
interactions, and they continue to use
a snapshot view of customers to
determine next offers, rather than
adapting communications to account
for what customers are saying right
now about their interests or intent.
• Time-consuming processes.
Businesses are wasting time in
manual processes attempting to keep
analytics, reporting, list generation
and finance teams on the same page
around campaign planning, execution
and measurement.
• Doing more with less. Marketers are
under increasing pressure to do more
with less, yet they lack the tools to
understand where to throttle back or
adjust marketing program investments
to maintain performance targets.
• Lack of automation. Many
companies are encumbered by years
of accumulated complexity inherent in
customized marketing and campaign
processes that limit their ability to
scale future marketing efforts.
YOUR GOAL: Always take the best marketing action
There has never been a more challenging time to keep your customers’ attention. With
an array of technology at their disposal, customers can quickly shut down all communications to them, while simultaneously broadcasting their discontent via social media
to millions of other consumers and encouraging them to leave your brand. Technology
has helped transform “customer relationship management” into “customer-managed
relationships,” turning the tables on who dictates what is talked about how and when.
How did this happen? Companies that were after new ways to attract attention to old
campaigns invested heavily in staffing and technology infrastructures with each new
channel. Though justified in many cases by metrics such as response rates and clickthroughs, such efforts did not necessarily provide value. Consequently, the technologies
that support these endeavors are a mix of channel-centered solutions that strive to
understand customer needs, but do so with a shortsighted view of a specific channel. Beyond the dollars involved, these endeavors have cost companies in the area of efficiency.
What is needed is fresh thinking that embraces a view centered on the customer, where
each new channel better informs the company’s overall view of the customer.
OUR APPROACH
To move forward, companies need to lay a foundation for a customer-first approach,
with solutions designed to grow more sophisticated along with the organization. We
approach the problem by providing software and services to help you:
• Know immediately which offer is most likely to increase your customer’s value to
you during each interaction – online, in-store, call center, etc. – and instantly adapt
content and messages to account for competitive threats and external conditions.
• Enable marketers to design, create and adjust campaigns visually with an
easy-to-use interface that includes a library of standard campaign management
techniques, so non-technical staff can design flawless campaign processes, while
providing guardrails to ensure campaign best practices.
• Better understand how future scenarios using varying allocation options for
marketing campaigns would affect your business by using what-if simulations
and marketing strategy maps to assess your marketing mix.
• Unify your marketing efforts across all customer touch points using a single
system that interfaces with all relevant communications channels – inbound and
outbound – so that every customer action and reaction is planned, executed,
measured and, ultimately, learned from.
• Determine the best offer for each customer by evaluating multiple campaigns simultaneously using mathematical optimization and predictive analytics, so you can best
achieve campaign objectives while managing budget and contact policy constraints.
SAS provides marketers with all of the capabilities needed to plan, execute and
optimize marketing initiatives while showing quantifiable impact and guidance toward
meeting an organization’s strategic goals.
THE SAS® DIFFERENCE: Making marketing a profitable revenue growth engine
Taking the best marketing action requires a broad range of capabilities, and SAS has
that covered. No other solution can generate the returns, process improvements and
positive customer interactions that SAS can. SAS gives you the ability to:
• Lower your cost of ownership, and get a higher return on your total marketing
investment. With the marketing mix increasing in complexity and costs, it is more
important than ever to justify where and why each dollar is spent. Only SAS offers
complete channel coverage via a single interface, which means fewer software tools
to manage and coordinate – and no handoffs.
• Flawlessly execute your marketing campaigns. Superior data management
capabilities let you spend less time managing and moving data, and more time
focusing on better understanding your customers and market opportunities.
• Instantly adapt to customer interactions. Businesses must react to customer
decisions with increasing speed – often in real time – over a variety of channels. SAS
Analytics generate powerful insights that can be easily deployed into your campaign
selections, your real-time decisions and your front-office channels, enabling you to
deliver relevant offers and messages to consumers anywhere and everywhere.
Our focus on generating superior marketing return on investments, flawless execution and continually helping marketers adapt to customer interactions are the reasons
why SAS is cited by marketing professionals and leading analyst firms as invaluable in
making the business of marketing a profitable revenue growth engine.
CASE STUDY: Chico’s
What if you could ...
Calculate next best action/offer
What if you could instantly pick the best
offer among thousands that would delight
your customer at the precise moment – in
the call center, online or in the store?
Easily create campaigns
What if your marketers had the tools
necessary to build out and scale
hundreds or thousands of campaigns,
while also being able to exploit the best
customer models, without needing any
statistical expertise?
Assess your marketing mix
What if you could know which marketing activities to invest in to maximize the
impact on company profitability targets?
Deliver multichannel interactions
What if you could seamlessly choreograph
customer interactions across online,
mobile, in-store and at-home channels, all
driving toward overall campaign objectives
of increased sales, better profitability or
improved customer satisfaction?
Situation
Optimize interactions/investments
The women’s specialty retailer, which operates under Chico’s, White House | Black
Market and Soma brands, was looking for a way to get the rich customer information that was buried in the company’s sales, merchandising and customer data
into the hands of decision makers. The data was not consolidated across brands,
and the lack of scale and speed associated with such large data volumes and
processes affected the company’s ability to support direct marketing efforts.
What if you could ensure that each
customer would receive the best of all
possible offers that would balance their
needs against the needs of your business?
You can. SAS gives you
THE POWER TO KNOW®.
Solution
SAS provided a solution with a full set of predictive analytics and data mining tools
that enabled business users to:
• Integrate customer data from across brands and easily exploit resulting insights.
• Plan, test and execute marketing campaigns of any size or level of complexity.
• SAS has been in business since 1976
and today has customers at more than
50,000 sites worldwide.
• SAS customers make up 93 of the top
100 companies on the 2010 Fortune
Global 500®.
• Employ a full set of predictive analytics and data mining tools.
Results
• Higher sales volume, with fewer markdowns.
• Improved targeting of the company’s core demographic.
• Reduced campaign cycle times from an average of 30 days to four days.
• Tripled the lift on a campaign to bring back lapsed customers.
• SAS® Customer Intelligence was
named a winner of Customer
Interaction Solutions magazine’s 2010
CRM Excellence Award.
Learn more about SAS software and
services for customer intelligence:
www.sas.com/solutions/crm/
• More successful cross-promotion of other brands.
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+1 919 677 8000
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