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Publisher gets smart about marketing
Case Study: Savings all thanks to business intelligence

By Sylvia Carr

Published: Tuesday 28 November 2006

Publisher Wolters Kluwer has invested nearly £1m in business intelligence tools that are increasing the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns.

The company, which publishes both print and electronic materials on health, safety, legal and finance issues, has grown by acquisition and in the process acquired several sets of customers that it didn't necesarily know a lot about. Data existed on which publications and services they subscribed to, but it was locked up in disparate systems which made it difficult to get a quick view of each account.

Because of this, Wolters Kluwer's marketing team had a difficult time figuring out which of its products to pitch to which customers.

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In early 2006, the company was using the data analysis tool Faststats from Apteco - but felt it was limited in what it could do for them.

Mike Turner, business systems manager at Wolters Kluwer, said the challenge with considering a new software option was: "How would we build on this to give us a complete view of the customer?"

The company underwent a tender process and chose SAS marketing automation software, built on the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

SAS was chosen for the best TCO compared to four competing vendors and for its full-service approach. Turner said: "It could do all we needed it to do." He also liked the "joined-up approach" of the SAS products. The other shortlisted option entailed buying software components from a lot of different vendors and "gluing them together", he said.

The result has been more targeted and lucrative marketing campaigns - during a seven-week pilot of the SAS software earlier this year, response rates went up and one campaign returned three times the expected revenue.

The availability of up-to-date customer profiles means marketing staff are able to plan more strategically, said Wolters Kluwer's Turner. They can now figure out which products customers might be interested in and which formats - email, direct mail, telemarketing - are most effective.

Turner said one key advantage of the SAS system is the "clarity of knowledge" it provides for marketing campaigns. Wolters Kluwer's marketing team is able to see immediately whether a campaign is effective or not and react accordingly - if it's succeeding, they can do more of what's working, and if it's failing, they can stop it and cut their losses.

The new system has proved fairly easy for workers to learn - after just a few months, the vast majority of users are comfortable with it and "can't imagine life without it", said Turner.

Another benefit is that staff will no longer be needed to maintain legacy databases which contained customer info, as all the data has been migrated to the new system - and this staff can now be re-deployed elsewhere.

Turner said if the company continues to see the benefits and savings they've experienced so far, it's on track to meet the board's goal of a return on investment over the next three years, which is worth "just short of £1m", according to Turner.

"So far the project has stuck to our schedule, goals and objectives," he said.