The NCDM Database Excellence Award Winners

As the Marketing Store states in its entry form, “The tool gives dealerships unlimited access to their entire database of customers.” It also provides them with quick reports to “help drill into key subsets of the database.”

Above all, the tool has “generated additional revenue by helping attract more customers to the service departments of the dealership network.” The company now plans to further develop the tool. ?D

Award: Silver

Marketer: Progressive Enterprises Ltd.

Vendor: Proximity iD Ltd.

New Zealand was home to one of the top digital programs of 2008. Progressive Enterprises, owner of three national supermarket chains, launched its Onecard super Email Platform, a tool for sending relevant messages to shoppers.

Put together by Proximity iD Ltd., the system has many complex elements. For one thing, it contains a content management system into which thousands of product specials are loaded every week. It also includes an audience selection tool based on variables like the price points that a customer tends to shop for in a product category, and whether the household seeks discounts. Then there's the so-called analytics factory, which performs complex calculations and “aggregations on the 1 billion transactional rows of raw data.”

E-mail isn't the only channel. The system is also designed to serve shoppers on the Web, and via SMS.

The results? Onecard is now “one of the largest supermarket databases in New Zealand,” the company says. It covers 65% of all spending by nearly half of the New Zealand population. It also succeeded in reducing the cost of doing business.

ANALYTICS & MODELING APPLICATIONS

Award: Gold

Marketer and Client: Cisco Systems

When information technology marketer Cisco Systems sought to boost its fortunes through its analytic capabilities, it went to war.

More specifically, it went to WAR — it sought Wallet share improvement, Acquisition and Retention. (That's Cisco's acronym.) The objective was to generate $1 billion in incremental revenue by applying business intelligence to its sales and marketing functions.

Cisco launched this effort by consolidating its data querying process. Its systems had been slowed down by the large number of users running marketing scenarios, some of which were either irrelevant to or — worse still — redundant. The company hoped to cut processing time and ensure that all relevant departments would be working off the same set of data and analytics.

The firm also revamped its modeling. Several were designed to identify current customers who were most likely to purchase one of its main products within two quarters.

This activity required the creation of 1,400 models. The process resulted in leads — Cisco identified candidates for technology upgrades and complimentary hardware.

The company ran another 700 models to recognize prospects. These were applied to all companies listed by Dun & Bradstreet within the 70 countries Cisco determined made up its most important markets. The analysis incorporated data on each company's vertical and sub-vertical activities, number of employees, annual sales and other information.

This was harder than it sounds: In many cases, the quality of available company data varied greatly by company, and in some instances was insufficient for modeling purposes. Cisco constructed a series of imputation models to fill in the blanks.

Once Cisco determined who its prospects were, it grouped companies into segments based on how they would react to the four Ps of marketing (product, price, placement and promotion). This model also defined the best communication channels and messages.

Using its 2002 sales as a baseline, the firm pursued three goals: upselling a certain technology to purchasers of an earlier version; cross-selling to those who had made a related purchase after 2002; and acquiring customers that had not made a purchase from Cisco since 2002.

Was it smooth sailing all the way through? Not exactly. Cisco had to cope with a wide variety of applications that supported marketing and sales functions, and its data points required standardization. By its own admission, it was difficult to incorporate scores, clusters and estimates and took longer than expected.

There was human resistance as well: Cisco had to offer several rounds of education and training before the new systems were fully adopted.

The analyses and lead generation and ranking fed sales through multiple channels — by telephone, direct mail, e-mail marketing and event marketing — and through representatives. And they will continue to feed them. Why not, given the 370% lift a test panel of the highest-scoring prospects scored over a randomly chosen control panel?

The models have also yielded a variety of important lessons. Cisco can now map likely next purchases based on initial transactions. It also has a better handle on the mathematical relationship between customer loyalty and future revenue, as well as product defects and future revenue. The company has incorporated these learnings into its sales force training, and also uses them to improve development of Cisco products.

The ultimate metric? During the first 12 months of this new program, Cisco estimates it has generated an additional $940 million in additional bookings.

Award: Silver

Marketer: Valvoline

Vendor: Catalyst direct

Catalyst Direct, Inc. was retained by Valvoline Instant Oil Change to develop the relationships that they had with their customers as well as make a substantive, measurable and profitable impact on car count, which is measured by number of oil changes performed per day. In the quick lube industry, the ability to increase oil changes per day over the course of a year translates into substantial growth in revenue.