You Beta Your Life

As the holiday season approaches, readers may find themselves wondering what to buy for that special database marketing manager on their gift list.

The following new direct marketing support software, along with practical application stories from beta testers, may provide some guidance. One or two of them, plus several pounds of chocolate, should keep your favorite database marketer smiling through Presidents Day.

ESRI ESRI’s BusinessMap 2.0 features updated ZIP code and area code boundaries, as well as increased availability of “wizards” that guide users through setting up and using the program’s mapping functions. But for companies that want to print out their maps once their targets have been plotted, a new feature allows more viewable detail than ever before: Printouts can be broken up to form large-scale, multipanel wall charts.

Budget Rent-a-Car used the large-sized map function to plot its own outlets in Southern California, the locations of its business competitors and the whereabouts of its customers. Budget’s initial thrust was to reinforce relationships with business customers that were near both its own outlets and those of its competitors, which it did primarily through its sales force.

However, for non-customers, a direct mail effort brought in a host of likely prospects.

Budget’s director of local market sales John Lenstrohm profiled his customers, and retained Dun & Bradstreet to find similar businesses near either a Budget outlet or that of a competitor. Lenstrohm purchased a series of mailing lists based on this information, and sent out 146,284 solicitations throughout 1996 and 1997. Budget received 5,608 inquiries (a 3.83% response rate).

The offer, for a free day’s rental, had only one catch: The coupon had to be delivered in person by a Budget sales representative. Here again, BusinessMap proved useful, in that the software allowed Lenstrohm to cluster sales calls.

Red Brick Systems The data warehouse software sold by Red Brick Systems is built for speed. Red Brick Warehouse’s architecture is designed to cut down query time-even for warehouses containing a significant amount of information.

The Los Gatos, CA company’s most recent edition, version 5.1, incorporates Red Brick Vista, a feature that allows users to create summary tables off their warehouses, as well as Red Brick Administrator, which makes the query-writing process transparent through simplified language and a graphical user interface.

Shoe and accessories retailer Nine West Group is using the Red Brick Warehouse as a springboard into “push” technology electronic sales to its resellers. Although the program is still under development, data administrator Gene Alvarez hopes eventually to marry the software’s analytical capabilities with an e-mail program. Such a program would allow Nine West to redirect its products based on fluctuations in order quantities.

Through the warehouse, Alvarez hopes to make recommendations regarding products his customers are not purchasing that are selling well through other outlets in their areas. The warehouse, with its ability to quickly sort, weight and rank data, also helps Alvarez plan his discounting strategy. He’s able to offer better deals to smaller-volume, yet higher- profit customers than he would to larger, low-margin customers.

Another marketing strategy Red Brick Warehouse enables is sales-level analysis. If a given customer is found to have significant volume reductions, an automatic trigger alerts Nine West sales representatives to begin a conversation with the customer.

Alvarez takes a careful approach to layering DM features onto the warehouse, both to allow him to implement the systems in a structured fashion and to manage costs.

“When you are taking on these types of initiatives, don’t underestimate costs,” he says. “End users read [about software] and they want it all, `la carte.”

Team Approach Team Approach was developed specifically to support high-volume fundraising campaigns, with special emphasis placed on inbound data capture. The product comes with features applicable to the fundraising industry built in, including membership management, planned giving coordination, separate and specific support systems for major donors, who fundraisers give extra TLC to and pre-formatted special event modules.

The company’s recently released version 2.0 offers many new reports, including monthly income analysis, automatic matching gift reconciliation and enhanced national change of address (NCOA) functions.

For Thirteen/WNET, New York’s Public Broadcasting Service channel, the last was especially important. Before version 2.0 came out, the company used a mail house for a cold mailing. The mail house failed to purge names against WNET’s house list, and as a result renewals through acquisition shot through the roof. The new software allows in-house management of merge/purge functions.

Source codes also allow WNET to capture information about the program that was airing when it received the pledge call. This allows the station to make assumptions about the viewer’s affinity for specific shows, and to generate renewal letters reflecting this affinity. Theater buffs, for example, might receive renewal letters reminding them of recent “Great Performances,” while Monty Python fans would receive a differently worded solicitation.

This information helps WNET’s renewal efforts. “The people hardest to renew are those who come in through pledge,” says Maura Harway, who was recently promoted from membership director to director of long-range planning. “They are more transactional [premium-driven]. We are looking for ways to go back to them that refer to what they were watching.”

Making reference has helped. Due largely to the high percentage of credit card responses, WNET was pulling an 85% to 87% fulfillment rate. But by including a customized message reflecting viewer affinity programming, the station’s two most recent drives, in March and August, reached over 90% fulfillment. “The only thing we did differently was drop in that information,” says Harway.

Unica Unica Technologies, Lincoln, MA, has rolled out the “Enterprise Edition” of its flagship Model 1 data mining software. The release enhances Model 1’s scalability-it now supports up to 16,000 variables per customer-and integration with customer’s tech department infrastructure and pre-existing programs.

Model 1 is known for automating the data mining process, allowing models to be created off many variables with a few clicks of a mouse button. Its Response Modeler, Customer Segmenter/Profiler and Customer Valuator modules make it especially useful for prospecting campaigns.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is in an extremely competitive environment, vying with the Dallas Morning News. Marketing director Eric Rossi wanted to do a targeted prospecting mailing, and used Unica’s Model 1 to solidify assumptions about his reader base.

Model 1, which he actually purchased from distributor Group 1 Software, proved considerably easier to manipulate than the cumbersome product he had been using previously. Employing it, Rossi was able to reaffirm what he intuitively suspected his reader base looked like.

Rossi built a profile of four definable segments of his subscribers using Model 1 and Claritas. In descending order of affinity, they were professional, higher-income homeowners, families with children, individuals interested in sports and retired homeowners, which fit his gut-level profile of the Star-Telegram’s readers.

Rossi ran his demographics picture against a Polk Co. file of individuals in his target areas. A file consisting of the top three deciles, as determined by Model 1, left him with just under 50,000 prospect names after merge/purge.

Four separate creative efforts were generated, each playing to one of the targeted groups. (The one sent to professionals, for instance, looked like a business perks package.)

While he did not disclose actual response rates, Rossi did say that the top two markets responded at levels “well over 2 percent,” while the bottom two did not do quite as well.