SAS® Inspires Guideposts to Greater Marketing Efficiency

Once thought of as "the best kept secret in publishing," you'll be hearing a lot more now about Guideposts, the 58-year-old leader in the inspirational media category. Best known for its renowned founder, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and his "The Power of Positive Thinking," New York-based Guideposts publishes five magazines.

Guideposts magazine's success is reflected by other major publishing houses launching titles in the inspirational space – magazines such as O, the Oprah Magazine and Real Simple that Mediaweek grouped with Guideposts, calling them the "Soul Sisters." To help the marketplace understand the difference, Guideposts has turned to SAS. "The best way to differentiate ourselves and maintain our leadership position is through a customer relationship solution," says Helene Miller, Manager of Database Marketing Analysis. "That's what SAS gives us."

Detailed data gives Guideposts an edge
Since the 1970s, Guideposts has prided itself on its data-gathering ability, which has been frequently upgraded as new technology became available. For example, although there are three divisions, Guideposts assigns each customer just one ID number – and all divisions have access to that universal database of 30 million names and 15 years' worth of data. It incorporates demographic and psychographic information, promotional history and information from questionnaires that some of their 4.5 million customers fill out. For more than two decades, Guideposts has relied on SAS to dig through that data.

So when it was time to develop more sophisticated modeling – coinciding with the period when Guideposts magazine began to accept advertising – Guideposts turned to SAS data mining solutions.

With help from SAS, Guideposts is building models to:

• Cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers – Miller can determine which other products Customer A, who subscribes to Guideposts magazine, is likely to buy and then direct marketing materials accordingly.
• Decide which inactive customers are worth revisiting – "We can figure out, based on who has renewed in the past, which inactive customers to target," Miller says. "People whose subscriptions expired six to 10 years ago are marginal at best, but, by using SAS to analyze that group and looking at any other purchasing activity they've made, we're able to reactivate a large portion of them."
• Analyze leased prospect lists for new customers – In the past, for every 10 lists of potential leads, only one ended up being profitable. "With the right modeling, every list is a winner because we can find some pocket of names that is going to be profitable," says Miller. "Using SAS, we have a 100 percent success rate versus a traditional marketing success rate of 10 percent."
• Determine which products help lead to additional products – Data mining identifies purchase patterns and associations, explains Miller. "We heavily market the products that lead to other purchases."

With SAS, modeling is easy, fast and builds confidence
By making model building so easy and quick, SAS helps Guideposts even more. Miller said she can build a model in one to two weeks, versus the full month or longer it takes for other solutions that she has considered. Some models have taken as little as three days to construct.

As marketing realized that the SAS models allowed them to save money by sending out fewer mailings while returning the same amount of customers, Miller's group gained in importance. They have moved from the days when just one person produced 10 models a year, to a staff of five that collectively creates more than 100 models each year. "The success of the models using SAS has helped us gain confidence."

Making it easier is SAS/CONNECT, which allows analysts to view data from the organization's Oracle platform. "We can pluck people out at any time and analyze them without any intervention from an IT group. That cuts out a lot of time."

Miller's group shares the reports with everyone from marketing managers to executives. And new staff members end up with a pleasant surprise when they see what SAS can do for them. "They are definitely surprised at the capabilities we have," Miller said.

Using SAS to get the most from the Guideposts Web site
Miller says that in the future, Guideposts will use SAS to help make its Web site a more efficient sales engine. Miller wants to analyze who is coming to the site, what the click-through rate is and what marketing hooks are needed to get someone to buy a product. "I think SAS will be helping us out with all those things."

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