SAS® Marketing Optimization helps Scotiabank gain wallet share

Scotiabank is one of the five-largest financial institutions in Canada, offering deposit accounts, mutual funds, mortgages and lines of credit to seven million customers across the country. The bank has about 20 million customer accounts across its different business lines. With a strategy to gain more wallet share through effective marketing to its existing client base, Scotiabank's challenge is making sure customers get the right product or service offer at the right time, over the right channel.

Customer Success Video

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

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Customer Viewpoint
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Vic Moschitto
Director & Head of Decision Support and Management

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In the past, Scotiabank ran one-off customer campaigns for a total of five or six campaigns a year. Now, with SAS Marketing Optimization, the bank has increased exponentially the number of campaigns it runs per year, which is helping generate more sales.

"We're now running between 30 and 60 campaigns per year; these go out to half a million customers every month and help us generate about six million leads over the course of a year," said Vic Moschitto, Director and Head of Decision Support and Management for Canadian Banking at Scotiabank. "Finding those customers would have been a major hurdle under our old methodology, where every campaign was its own little island."

Moschitto's analytics team is responsible for helping the bank's business lines identify where they can improve customer retention. They use predictive modeling and optimization methodologies to provide campaign execution and decision support. The business line managers develop goals for the year related to account growth and analysts help them allocate leads on any given month – while balancing the needs of the different business lines so customers are not bombarded with marketing messages.

Using SAS Marketing Optimization, the analytics team is able to mine through the bank's seven million customers – and up to 18 months of data – to derive insights for more targeted customer campaigns. The SAS solution helps maximize campaign outcomes by helping refine individual customer communications; it increases marketing return on investment by determining the best offers for individual customers, while delivering analytic insight into the value of business constraints (such as channel capacity and contact policies).

For example, if Scotiabank has marketing budget allocated for 500,000 leads and two million customers are eligible, using SAS to model different scenarios based on available data helps business line managers determine the best bang for their buck.

"A customer's business is an opportunity for all our business lines and we have to decide which offers we should be putting in front of that specific customer," said Moschitto. "SAS Marketing Optimization allows us to see which offer is most relevant for a particular customer at a particular time. It also helps with customer service because we're able to take relevant offers and bundle them together into one campaign so we aren't inundating customers with offers."

Moschitto added, "A customer might only be contacted three times a year, with three products that are highly relevant to them at that time; if we approached customers all the time, they'd shut us out. We want to make sure that when we do approach a customer, we have a high rate of return."

SAS Marketing Optimization is helping Scotiabank achieve impressive results within its customer marketing strategy. Thanks to more targeted campaigns and improved customer service, annual growth is 80,000 to 100,000 incremental accounts more than what the bank would gain by simply waiting for customers to come through the door. "By using SAS, we're getting an ROI in excess of 100 percent – a significant return for the cost of the solution," said Moschitto. "The way we're able to integrate the software within our overall campaign and customer contact strategy is giving us a significant edge over our competitors."

With SAS, Scotiabank is able to make better use of its resources and speed up the time it takes to optimize a marketing concept, send leads or make trade-offs between business lines. These processes are also more automated, so the analytics team isn't constantly rewriting new campaigns.

SAS offers flexibility so analysts aren't forced down a single path to achieve their goals. They can use SAS for raw programming in terms of sorting and mining through their customer base, or they can use statistical modeling to predict customer behavior through marketing optimization. Using other front-end tools, they can deliver messages in PDF or HTML format to customers and send reports back to the business lines.

"I've never felt pigeonholed using SAS, and I've yet to find another software package that allows you to get your business where you want it to go as well as SAS does," said Moschitto. "It is quite simply the best software package on the market today."

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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