Who are your best customers? What can you do to retain them? How can you attract others like them? How can you improve the profitability of all your customers? The truth is that most companies have difficulty understanding and managing customer life cycles and profitability. This difficulty is due to problems designing and executing effective marketing campaigns, as well as problems measuring their effectiveness.

In the Spotlight Marketscope for Campaign Management, 1Q05 SAS receives a "positive" rating in Gartner's 2005 Marketscope for marketing campaign management. Access this report for full details. (login required)

Business operates today at breakneck speed, and large marketing organisations must deliver and track sophisticated, event-driven marketing communications within increasingly tight timeframes.

Companies also struggle to coordinate outbound campaigns with inbound customer interactions, meaning that customer behavior often fails to trigger more timely communications.

To create customer and prospect profiles, identify your most profitable customers, optimise multichannel communications and anticipate customer needs, marketers need the ability to: Create customer intelligence from the mountains of disconnected customer data the company collects on a daily basis. Apply that intelligence to create the ideal marketing mix or channel distribution and execute more targeted, effective inbound and outbound campaigns. Measure the value of those campaigns and feed that information back into the planning process.

SAS Customer Intelligence comprises a family of solutions that help you maintain and grow profitable customer relationships. These fully integrated and extendable solutions truly give you the knowledge to interact with the right customers at the right time, through the right channel.

SAS Marketing Automation gives you the ability to easily manage sophisticated, timely, personalised customer communication strategies. Using SAS Marketing Automation, marketers can create more accurate, analytically derived segments and then use that information to conduct more effective outbound campaigns.

As marketing organisations become more and more sophisticated, they realise the need to support event-driven marketing, which involves careful, real-time tracking of customer behavior. SAS Interaction Management helps you view each individual customer's behavior over time and act on significant changes immediately – when intervention is likely to have the most impact.

When inbound and outbound communications continue to grow and mature, companies recognise that customers typically qualify for a variety of solicitations. Consequently, it becomes necessary to optimise the mix of interactions with a particular customer. SAS Marketing Optimisation evaluates multiple campaigns simultaneously to determine which products should be marketed to individual customers for maximum return – all while factoring in budget and channel constraints, as well as customer contact policy restrictions.