After nearly nine years of building a successful niche business exclusively through web-based marketing, Richlund Ventures' Compact Appliance Division decided to expand their efforts to multi-channel marketing. Like many small and medium-sized companies, the online retailer of distinctive home appliances recognized that building customer loyalty has become more difficult in a completely web-based environment.

"To be successful, you need to acquire customers and re-market to them," says Jason Roussos, vice president of marketing. "We've been successful in web-based marketing because we have the tools and know-how to benchmark the success of our campaigns, but we don't have the same expertise in direct mail. We needed a database tool to help us monitor the effectiveness of our direct mail and e-mail campaigns."

The company runs on a popular legacy ERP system for catalogers, and building a database tool from scratch wasn't an option, particularly with a database of nearly 300,000 customers.

"Getting data out of our ERP system is a nightmare," says Roussos. "We've built custom applications to get data out, but then we have the question of 'what to do with the data?'"

Roussos researched the market, even considering web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, in hopes of finding the answer, but quickly realized its limitations. "There weren't a lot of marketing solutions for the small-mid sized market," he says. There were plenty of SaaS solutions, but none with queries and best practice suites built in."

"I met with a consulting company in New York that wanted to charge me nearly $700,000 for a plan; there was no deliverable," Roussos adds. "We can't afford to pay consultants and get no results. I just wanted to find out how to effectively and economically test our efforts, and not spend $100,000 doing so."

Then, while researching loyalty marketing on the web, Roussos discovered Desktop Marketing Solutions, Inc. (DMSI), developers of WiseGuys software.

"DMSI's website was very informational and had a lot of good press," says Roussos. "I was impressed to see the positive reviews WiseGuys received from Ernie Schell", a noted authority on direct marketing software.

After talking with DMSI President Bruce Gregoire, and learning about WiseGuys software, Roussos felt confident he had found a solution to his problem.

"After talking with Bruce, it felt right," Roussos says. "I was able to learn from him."

"WiseGuys was offered at a price point where it seemed like we had nothing to lose and everything to gain, which made it an easy sell," he adds.

Roussos spent less than $15,000 for WiseGuys, including customization.

"The implementation went very smoothly," says Roussos. "DMSI had knowledge about our ERP system which made it easier."

"The fact that WiseGuys is built on Microsoft Access made the implementation very straightforward and easy on my IT staff," he added.

After less than two weeks of training, Roussos' staff was ready to test out the system. Because they didn't have any direct mail campaigns in the queue, they began by tracking an e-mail campaign for two months.

"The match-back ability in WiseGuys is critical," says Roussos. "Before, we would trace 60 orders back to an e-mail campaign and my reporting would have shown $20,000 in sales. Now we can see that people who received the e-mail ordered by phone and the campaign actually generated $100,000. That's powerful."

Based on the results from his e-mail marketing results, Roussos is looking forward to analyzing direct mail campaigns.

"I've always been reluctant to do direct mail campaigns because I wasn't confident in my ability to measure them," he says. "We're doing our first print pieces in the next couple of weeks and a small catalogue in the next couple of months. I'm really looking forward to seeing how effective they are."