By Peter Vanderlee
Last month saw a flurry of acquisitions as marketing agency heavyweights sought to bolster their ability to use data and analytics to make campaigns for enterprise clients more accurate and efficient. According to DM News, Merkle acquired Cognitive Data, while marketing agency rival Epsilon created a new business intelligence division, Epsilon Targeting. Also, information services provider Telematch made two acquisitions to improve its data dashboarding, analytics and database management. 
AmazingProspects process
AmazingProspects process
Even traditional advertising agencies are beginning to understand the importance of how data mining can bolster campaigns, with WPP recently partnering with Omniture, and Oglivy North Amercia partnering with Unica and Pluris to enhance their data mining offerings.
At AmazingMail, we’re totally on top of this trend, but with a significant difference. We believe using data and analytics to make campaigns more accurate and efficient should be made equally available – and affordable – to small and medium organizations (including non-profits), putting them on equal footing with the data profiling and modeling services utilized by large enterprises.
That’s why today, at the DM Days New York Conference and Expo we’re launching AmazingProspects, an automated service that allows any organization to “clone” their best customers against consumer and business databases with profiling and modeling technology.
According to Merkle’s COO, Don Patrick, as costs continue to rise for mail, marketers are looking for ways to be “smarter” about how they go to market. He points out, “Once marketers learn to mail smarter, they continue to mail better even after the economic environment gets better.”
Peg Kuman, CEO of Telematch, agrees. “Particularly in a climate like this, people are much more focused on knowing who their best customers are. To that degree, the more you can learn about what makes buyers respond will make you a better marketer.”
Priced at $500 for an initial profile to determine what best customers look like, and then at a fraction of what typical modeled leads cost, AmazingProspects allows SMB customers to choose as few as 500 or millions of prospects.
AmazingProspects utilizes automated analytics software that can uncover hidden insights about an organization’s current customers (or in the case of non-profit businesses, donors), and delivers a ranked list of “look-a-like” prospects that are “clones” – having the same or similar characteristics of best customers or donors. As a result, these cloned prospects have a high likelihood of becoming new customers.
More important, AmazingProspects, through automation, can provide scored and modeled prospects in a fraction of the time – and at a fraction of the cost – of mainstream analytic services.
That means that small and medium-sized businesses can now target prospects both old and new in greater numbers with far greater accuracy and with the confidence of a military commander. They can look at computer-generated maps to see where their prospects are located, locally, regionally, or even nationally. They can plot special promotions for where prospects are most clustered. They can withdraw sales forces from where prospects are not. And they can conquer what some perceive as the low rates of return on direct mail campaigns.
Today the industry norm says you can expect 1% or 2% responding from an un-targeted mailing. But with campaigns targeted at your very best prospects, the percentage might be as much as 5%. And then when you mix targeted direct mail with other forms of marketing communications, such as email, text-to-mobile, and personalized Web page (PURLs) response rates can climb to 10% or even 20%.
That’s what accuracy and efficiency derived from using AmazingProspects can ultimately do for you.
(Peter Vanderlee is VP Marketing with AmazingMail.com Inc., located in Phoenix AZ. AmazingMail’s automated, multi-channel direct marketing platform, AmazingCampaigns, delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns.)
