LexisNexis' Search for Data Quality Leads to SAS®, Projected Savings

2003 CRM Magazine CRM Elite Award Winner 

LexisNexis^TM – the global leader in comprehensive and authoritative legal, news and business information – provides extensive online services that combine searchable access to more than 3 billion documents from thousands of sources, including the world's most respected legal publishers.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about LexisNexis and its successes with SAS.

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Customer ViewPoint
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Rick Jones
Vice President, Market Information & Analysis, LexisNexis

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Bill Welch
Marketing Systems Manager, LexisNexis

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Customers rely on LexisNexis for precision in their Web-based queries to LexisNexis online services so that they're not bombarded with nonessential information from the ever-expanding universe of cyberspace. Meanwhile, LexisNexis relies on SAS for precision to ensure that the nation's attorneys and law firms aren't bombarded with duplicate or unwanted mailings of nonessential marketing and promotional materials about their services.

Located in Dayton, Ohio, LexisNexis had outsourced the mailing of more than 10 million pieces of mail supporting more than 1,000 campaigns in previous years. In an effort to reduce that quantity while providing the customer with better quality information, LexisNexis turned to SAS. With analytics and data quality solutions from SAS, LexisNexis brought that job in-house and is significantly reducing the volume of mail it's sending – with fewer pieces of mail going to its customers. The projected savings is more than $1 million a year.

Accurate Names, Addresses with ETL^Q
The challenge for LexisNexis is to create a concise, accurate, up-to-date marketing database from a wide range of sources, including internal databases, state attorney registrations and third-party databases. The resulting data quality issues can be numerous, including name duplication, gender analysis, entity analysis, address verification, householding, parsing, casing, and matching and merging.

With SAS Data Quality, SAS customers are guaranteed ETL^Q, a reliable extraction, transformation and loading solution whose quality is strengthened to the power of Q. With ETL^Q, LexisNexis gains award-winning data warehousing with a single point of control from SAS/Warehouse Administrator. The company also benefits from cutting-edge data quality technology from DataFlux, a SAS company and the leader in increasing the accuracy and usability of enterprisewide database assets. With SAS, LexisNexis has an effective blend of software to help reduce expensive mailings, improve customer services and analyze campaign effectiveness – in house.

"Our former outsourcing vendor didn't worry about data quality because limiting the number of mailings wasn't in their best interest, which is one of the reasons why we took this on – and the results have been outstanding," says Bill Welch, LexisNexis' marketing systems manager. "The whole process is to bring all these data sources together, to analyze and cleanse them and then put match codes and CASS verifications on them. We use SAS to roll all these different sources together to make deductions at an individual level."

Escaping Disparate Data, Duplicate Mailings
Before introducing its SAS solution, LexisNexis faced high costs and duplication issues typical among outsourced marketing campaigns:

• Mailing against multiple sources, resulting in duplicate mailings to the same person.
• Sending "new" customer offerings to existing customers because of disparate databases.
• Inability to track campaigns without a way to measure response rates.
• Targeting specific individuals very difficult.

"The reality is that many law firms have multiple offices," explains Rick Jones, LexisNexis' vice president of Market Information and Analysis. "Let's say you have branches in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. First, how do you accurately identify them as a single firm? Next, how do you determine who does the purchasing within those firms? You don't want to suppress so many individuals that you don't get to the proper purchasing authority, but you do want to be able to accurately roll it up to quantify the firm's size and buying power."

Bill Welch, marketing systems manager, LexisNexis

With about one million lawyers in the United States – each with an average of three identifications (name variations) within LexisNexis' data sources – it's easy to see why the company wanted to cleanse the data to reflect a single name per person. "Without a filtering mechanism, it's conceivable for a single attorney to receive eight to 12 solicitations a month," Jones says. "If you assume that we're putting at least 10 million offers in the mail each year, without any controls, the potential negative impact on our clients could be tremendous – not to mention the marketing dollars we'd be wasting. With SAS, our costs have certainly gone down."

Campaign Analysis: Finding Out What Works, What Doesn't
The real benefit to Jones is that, with SAS, LexisNexis can track to whom it sends offers, thus avoiding duplication while being able to build the proper response and defection models. "Not only can we reduce the sheer volume of mail that's sent out, but now with SAS, we can see its effectiveness. The true benefit to us and to our clients will come in the long run from being able to point out which campaigns work and which ones don't," Jones says. "We're reducing our costs, and reducing the burden to our customers."

With SAS, LexisNexis has:

• Improved control over the number of touches made to a single customer.
• Reduced the number of duplicate, redundant and erroneous mailings to firms and specific individuals with 100 percent CASS-certification of outgoing campaigns.
• Added the ability to monitor and track campaign results.
• Reduced mail expenses while improving campaign results in both actual usage and increased revenue.

Such results impart strategic opportunities for integrated marketing at LexisNexis. "Instead of cutting the overall spend on our mail, we're going to funnel it into more effective campaigns," Jones says. "What we're banking on is that we'll be able to identify those campaigns that are most successful and build models and do mailings based on what works."

Building the Superior Customer Experience
Ultimately, LexisNexis is building on their strategy to provide a "superior customer experience."

"SAS lets us provide our customers with a good product that meets their needs, leaving them with a good feeling about our business," Welch says. "SAS was the key element that let us merge individuals from various data sources into one database. And SAS is definitely our principal solution for heavy-duty analytics and business intelligence."

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