Tech Solution: Marketing Campaign Optimization Tools
Today's marketing organizations deliver communications that are more diverse and frequent than ever before. As a result, marketing budgets are continually strained, and there is mounting pressure to improve response rates and revenues from campaigns. Campaign management applications improve a campaign's efficiency and execution, but optimization solutions let marketers plan and prioritize outbound customer communications to maximize effectiveness while balancing the organization's capacity to deliver.
Aprimo Marketing Performance Management
Delivery Model: Web-based
Price: Starts at $50,000. Price variations are based on configuration.
Business Benefits: Marketing Performance Management offers a combination of data access, analysis, and presentation tools to provide feedback on marketing processes as they happen, thus allowing marketers to make changes in real time.
Functionality: The Scorecard and Metrics Manager provides marketers with a framework to define specific metrics to measure and track as it rolls them up into logical groups for reporting. A Strategy and Goals Manager allows users to define and track progress toward specific marketing goals. A Strategy and Goals Manager for the corporate level can present data in a strategy map that fits into a scorecard to give executives a view of how the company's marketing strategy is doing in terms of finances, customers and stakeholders, internal processes, and learning and growth. Marketing Performance Management also supports various presentation formats (charts, reports, and alerts) within Aprimo's MPM Access portal (a Web-browser environment).
Contact: Aprimo at 1-317-803-4300; email at info@aprimo.com; or visit www.aprimo.com
Unica Affinium Campaign Optimize
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: Starts at $60,000. Price variations are based on database size and number of users.
Business Benefits: Affinium Campaign Optimization, a component of the Affinium Enterprise Marketing Management suite, develops contact recommendations based on customer feedback, letting marketers target customers with relevant offers. Marketers can define standard business rules and constraints as best practice templates and leverage them across sessions to ensure that legal rules, business requirements, and operational restrictions are enforced across all campaigns.
Functionality: Users can configure marketing campaigns via rules and constraints around customers, offers, channels, and time. Customer preferences such as contact frequency, offer/product interests, and channel usage may be configured and updated at any point in time. Campaign Optimization also enables marketers to view and compare the number of proposed contacts, offers, and channels, as well as the number of contact dates, to the optimized recommendations. For each test and production run of an optimization session, Campaign Optimization generates reports that highlight rule performance, customer, channel, and offers analysis and customer migration from one campaign session to another.
Contact: Unica Corp. at 1-781-839-8000; email at unica@unica.com; or visit www.unica.com
SAS Marketing Optimization
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: Starts at $125,000. Price variations based on the number of customer records.
Business Benefits: Marketing Optimization enables marketers to increase returns on campaigns by making mathematically optimized decisions about customer offers. Marketers can use budgets more efficiently while improving channel effectiveness by understanding the economic impact of a direct marketing campaign. The product also reduces customer dissatisfaction by eliminating uncoordinated or conflicting marketing.
Functionality: Marketing Optimization can either function on its own or as a complement to SAS Marketing Automation or SAS Enterprise Miner. Users can define standards constraints based on budgets, channel capacity, cell sizes, hurdle rates, and customer contact policies. Marketers can specify financial objectives, such as spending at least $150,000 on offers to undermarketed customers in a particular region. Scenario analysis defines alternate approaches and outcomes within an optimization project. Each scenario can have a different set of constraints, marketing costs, business objectives, and customer contact policies. Marketing Optimization also includes reporting and graphics to provide multiple views of a project, such as summary reports and graphs that show total offers and expected profitability.
Contact: SAS Institute at 1-800-727-0025; email at contracts_support@sas.com; or visit www.sas.com
Contact Editorial Assistant Colin Beasty at cbeasty@destinationCRM.com