Products & Solutions / Marketing Optimization

SAS® Marketing Optimization

Plan and optimize your outbound communications

SAS Marketing Optimization helps you maximize economic outcomes by making the most of each individual customer communication. The solution increases marketing ROI by determining the best offers for individual customers, while delivering analytic insight into the value of your business constraints, such as channel capacity and contact policies.

Benefits

  • Improve marketing ROI.
  • Enhance contact strategy.
  • Increase organizational efficiency.

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Features

  • Robust optimization formulation
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Scenario analysis
  • Contact strategy
  • Reporting and analysis

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“It is extremely important for us to partner with a trusted vendor, such as SAS, to turn raw data into an intelligent tool for reducing credit risk and increasing revenue by selling new products to existing and potential customers.”

—Daniel Chong

Director of Marketing

PrimeCredit

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Screenshots

Sensitivity analysis helps you maximize ROI and limit opportunity costs.

Screenshot: Sensitivity analysis helps you maximize ROI and limit opportunity costs.
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How SAS® Is Different

Built on proven, award-winning technology, SAS Marketing Optimization combines the technology, methodology and industry expertise needed to optimize your customer communications: It’s the only solution that combines:

  • True mathematical optimization versus simple rules-based analysis.
  • User-defined constraint modeling.
  • Scenario, sensitivity and feasibility analyses.
  • Integration with industry-leading marketing automation platform.

Benefits

  • Improve marketing ROI. SAS Marketing Optimization provides what-if analysis that helps you quantify where changes in your organization will really pay off. Such analysis improves your targeting efforts, which can lead to higher response rates, improved channel effectiveness and reduced spending.
  • Enhance contact strategy. With SAS Marketing Optimization, you can optimize your contact strategy across complex contact policies – avoiding over-saturating customers and violating corporate governance requirements. Uncoordinated and conflicting communications are eliminated, and relationship factors, such as customer risk, advertising exposure and householding, can be incorporated into your contact strategy.
  • Increase organizational efficiency. SAS Marketing Optimization allows you to ensure that you’ve got the optimal balance of marketing operations staff to efficiently execute campaigns across multiple channels.

Features

Robust optimization formulation
  • Solve for a wide range of business objectives – such as maximize profit, minimize market cost and achieve sales volume goals – that let you maximize or minimize virtually any numeric value.
  • Combine constraints based on budgets, channel capacities, cell sizes, hurdle rates and individual customer contact policies.
  • Create custom constraints such as minimum ROI or minimum revenue threshold.
Easy-to-use interface
  • Easily navigate through the optimization process.
  • Use wizards to create input data, new projects, scenarios and filters, and to integrate with SAS Marketing Automation.
  • Reuse existing work by creating, copying, renaming, deleting or comparing scenarios via the interface.
  • Hide/expose advanced optimization functions to support the needs of different users.
Scenario analysis
  • Optimize scenarios and review the analytic output reports to determine which scenario will bring the best result.
  • Run different scenarios based on constraints and optimization objectives, contact policy and offer economics.
  • Import offer solutions (e.g., from a campaign management system) and compare to SAS Marketing Optimization scenarios.
  • Send optimal offer solutions directly to your campaign execution system.
Contact strategy
  • Specify the number of offers to assign to each customer over the planning horizon.
  • Specify the number of offers during any rolling time period.
  • Specify the number of offers from a group or subgroup of offers.
  • Specify blocking policies (e.g., if you make offer A, then offer B can’t be made for three weeks).
Reporting and analysis
  • Provide multiple views of a project with reports and graphics.
  • Show total offers and expected profitability with offer summary reports.
  • Illustrate the actual consumption of resources and the opportunity costs for constraints using constraint summary reports.
  • Generate response curves that show your optimization objective (e.g., profit) as it corresponds to a wide range of constraint values.
  • Automatically create OLAP cubes based on input data and scenario results.
  • Publish or e-mail reports of competing scenarios before execution.

Screenshots

Sensitivity analysis helps you maximize ROI and limit opportunity costs.

This screenshot shows a telecommunications cross-sell project in SAS Marketing Optimization with a sensitivity analysis graph displayed. This graph shows that as you approach a certain constraint limit on overall budget, profit levels off. This type of information helps the marketers determine proper constraints to maximize ROI and limit opportunity costs.

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Reporting capabilities show you multiple views of a project.

Multiple views of a project are available through the reporting and graphics capabilities in SAS® Marketing Optimization. This view shows a simple comparison between two offers.

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Reporting capabilities show you multiple views of a project.

Multiple views of a project are available through the reporting and graphics capabilities in SAS® Marketing Optimization. This report shows a summary of expected profit for an optimized scenario.

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Easily define alternate scenarios.

This screenshot shows a telecommunications cross-sell project in SAS Marketing Optimization with 5 scenario steps.  SAS Marketing Optimization allows a business user to take campaign data, apply suppressions and constraints, and optimize contact policies to ensure the highest possible ROI per campaign.

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System Requirements

Operating systems
  • SAS Server
  • HP-UX IPF
  • HP PA-RISC
  • IBM AIX
  • Microsoft Windows
  • Sun Solaris
Middle tier servers
  • HP-UX IPF
  • IBM AIX
  • Microsoft Windows
  • Sun Solaris
Clients
  • Microsoft Windows
Application servers
  • BEA Weblogic
  • IBM Websphere
Required software

An application server is required (supported versions above), but SAS Marketing Optimization ships with all the other required software for both the server and the clients.

Optional software

SAS Marketing Optimization is designed to use predictive models of customer response, economic valuation models of customer profitability and marketing costs, and the results of design of experiments tests on offers and treatments. SAS products that provide or facilitate these capabilities are SAS Enterprise Miner™, SAS/QC® and SAS Activity-Based Management. SAS Marketing Automation provides campaign management and execution capabilities to complete the marketing communication process chain.

Please contact your SAS representative for additional details about technical requirements.

Ready to learn more?

Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.