By Tracy Fitzpatrick for Desktop Marketing Solutions, Inc.

"We had just lost our director of marketing," said Joe Schmitt, president of Porter's Camera and RAPIDS Wholesale Equipment Company. "I didn't know if I should hire to replace, or if I needed a different skill set. I wasn't sure what we were trying to accomplish and what we needed."

Things hadn't been running as effectively as he'd hoped, and now was the time to reassess their goals and move forward.

Joe and his brother Jeff work together to run two very different companies: Porter's Camera, a business-to-consumer photography store, and RAPIDS Wholesale Equipment, a business-to-business wholesale restaurant equipment firm. Any solution they chose had to be adaptable to both business models.

"We've been struggling for several years to quickly assess marketing campaign results and have consistent reporting for both companies," he said. Their current system took several weeks of effort to run and test direct mail campaigns, and he needed to find a better way.

The following week, Joe received an e-mail newsletter about WiseGuys software and decided to investigate. "WiseGuys sounded like everything we wanted from our marketing, but couldn't figure out how to do. But the company was small and I was skeptical about WiseGuys' scalability."

Between the two companies, Schmitt knew he'd be loading over a million transactions into WiseGuys, something he wanted to ensure the software could support.

Schmitt went to Minneapolis to meet the president of Desktop Marketing Solutions, Inc. (DMSI), Bruce Gregoire. "Bruce's responsiveness and willingness to expand WiseGuys for his customers, especially direct marketers, impressed me," said Schmitt.

"The tipping point in my decision was how quickly WiseGuys would enable us to get the analytics done," he explained. "It was clear that we could hire an administrator to generate the WiseGuys reports, and I could do the analysis myself in minutes." That difference alone would save Schmitt $40,000 annually.

Within six weeks, Schmitt had launched his first direct mail campaign using the WiseGuys system. "We had several million mail pieces in the database and roughly 600,000 names. Any time we hit a hurdle during the process, DMSI had us back on track within 24 hours. It was painless."

Over the next eight months, Schmitt saw an even greater return on investment than expected. "Our new ability to analyze mailings helped us determine that return customers were buying as much from an e-mail as a catalog. We'll save $120,000 just in mailings this year." In addition, they've identified areas of substantial savings by reducing mailings on unprofitable segments, and even hired an in-house telemarketer with the money they've saved.

Next on the list is taking full advantage of the WiseGuys cross-sell module. "The cross-sell analytics seem to work tremendously. We're in the middle of running tests and so far the results are impressive," he said.

"With WiseGuys, I can go in and find everybody who bought 3 months ago, but hasn't made a purchase since. We're finding the sweet spot for contacting them again, and determining at what point they'll be ready to make another purchase."

Schmitt has also found WiseGuys to be valuable in his multi-channel marketing efforts. "We'll be executing the cross-sell program weekly," he said. "If I don't contact a customer who bought a camera within a couple of days, it's likely they'll go to a competitor to buy their camera bag."

Overall, Schmitt has been amazed with the volume of testing he's been able to accomplish. "With WiseGuys, you can do more testing and analysis than you've probably ever done, because the timeline has been consolidated dramatically. What used to be painful is now simple."