Case Study: Contact Management

First of all, some personal business! Our wedding was perfect--very romantic and beautiful. It was so nice to spend time with family and see old friends. Maui was pretty awesome, too.

But, believe it or not, I missed posting to this blog and it's good to get back into the swing of things. It's Monday and time for a direct marketing case study. I thought I would build on the concept of B2B lead management practices that I reported on last month. Today's case study comes to us from Direct Alliance, a firm that provide business process outsourcing (BPO) competencies in sales and marketing. It highlights how important analytics can be in understanding and impacting customer behavior (a concept that I firmly believe in).

Description
Customer analytics results score big with client and drives improved targeting and increased sales.

Business Challenge
The Client is a world leader in developing, manufacturing, and supplying printing solutions. Faced with increasing direct competition, the Client needed a cost-effective customer management strategy that would enable them to better understand and anticipate customer decision-making and buying behavior. Specifically, they wanted to understand the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, determine their market position by type of business–such as small-medium and large enterprise–, know which products contributed most to their bottom-line financials, and reduce their cost of sales.

Solution
Direct Alliance developed a customer database analytical modeling program to review customer monthly, quarterly and annual purchasing patterns over a three-year period. From this, Direct Alliance developed scoring model to identify customers with a high-propensity to purchase within a specific quarter. The second part of the solution was the development of personalized product offerings to accommodate the customer’s quarterly buying cycle that were supported by personalized electronic direct marketing and call campaigns. Weekly pipeline reviews were conducted to continually evaluate the progress and success of customer contact and sales efforts.

Metrics
The Direct Alliance scoring model predicted customer buying patterns with 90% accuracy and customer touch improved to 100% from an average of 30%. Improved accuracy and effectiveness led to a 98% increase in first quarter revenues vs. only 69% in prior quarter, and buying accounts increased 42% percent year-over-year.