SAS^® Marketing Optimization

Features

Optimization formulation

• Maximize profit, revenue, account balance and more; minimize marketing cost; and achieve sales volume goals using optimization formulation to account for:
  • Budget, contact policies and resource consumption.
  • Channel availability for store, branch, call center, direct mail, e-mail, mobile or other channels.
  • Customer-level attributes, such as consumer credit scores or recent purchase amounts.
  • Desired minimum or maximum cell sizes for any campaign, offer or offer combination.
  • Nearly any custom customer-level criteria, such as "total revenues greater than or equal to $25 million," or "average portfolio risk score greater than or equal to 680."

User interface

• Navigate easily through the optimization process with an interface that lets you:
  • Use wizards for frequent tasks and for integrating with SAS Marketing Automation.
  • Reuse existing work.
  • Hide or expose advanced optimization functions to support different users' needs.

Scenario analysis

• Use scenario analysis to determine impact of each constraint on the overall objective as you:
  • Optimize multiple scenarios, then review and compare outputs.
  • Run different scenarios based on constraints and optimization objectives, contact policy and offer economics.
  • Send the optimal solution directly to the campaign execution system.

Contact strategy

• Over- or under-contacting customers can affect loyalty, response rates and profit. This easy-to-use tool lets you:
  • Specify how many offers to assign each customer or household across the planning horizon or rolling time period.
  • Specify number of offers from a group or subgroup (e.g., make at most two cross-sell offers through e-mail or at most one rebate offer per brand).
  • Specify blocking policies (e.g., if you make Offer A, don't make Offer B for three weeks).

Reporting and analysis

• Prebuilt reports include:
  • Offer Summary reports and graphs showing total costs, total profit and other metrics by offer, product, channel, time period, campaign, offer group or offer subgroup.
  • Optimal results by offer, product, channel, time period, campaign, offer group or offer subgroup.
  • Visual Sensitivity analysis for all constraints.
  • Range Analysis graph when two objectives are defined.
• Collaborative capabilities let you publish or e-mail reports of competing scenarios before execution.
• OLAP cubes, which are automatically created based on input data and results of scenarios, enable detailed analysis of results before execution.
• Rich reports compare differing objectives within a scenario and show comparisons across scenarios to reflect impact on various counts and critical measures.