WiseGuys CRM messaging was introduced in Oct., 2009 to provide Marketing Automation email tools that not only generate response, but measure the impact.   Here are answers to some of the questions we’re hearing most often about WiseGuys CRM:

Q: Is WiseGuys CRM a Sales Force Automation (SFA) package?
A: No – although it has unique B2B marketing capabilities.  SFA started as the most common niche for CRM software (and dominates to this day), but it is not the focus of WiseGuys CRM. WiseGuys fits into the category of CRM Marketing Automation.

Q: What is meant by CRM Marketing Automation?
A: Francis Buttle, in “Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Technologies,” describes this as event-based trigger marketing used to launch messaging and offer presentation to customers at particular points in time. The advantage that WiseGuys CRM brings is that it not only triggers the communications, but it measures the results.

Q: What else qualifies the re-launch of WiseGuys as a CRM tool?
A: WiseGuys fulfills the promise of 1-to-1 marketing first described by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers a decade ago. Research by ATG Services has shown that, even with advances in technology, 3/4 of consumers want personalized product recommendations, but only 1/4 of marketers offer them. WiseGuys CRM has begun to fill that void. In fact, our early results show up to a 30% response rate from 1-to-1 email campaigns.

Q: Can you give examples of 1-to-1 messaging that WiseGuys CRM provides?
A: Yes - here are some common examples:

• Automated welcome messages to new customers/donors, personalized with their most recent transaction. 
• Lapsed messages with an irresistible offer to re-activate former high-value customers.
• Thank-you messages to recognize your best customers, perhaps with an offer of free shipping.
• Cross-sell messages based on previous purchases: see Amazon example below.
• Drip marketing campaigns that rely on repeated contact, or "touches," with potential customers. This is ideal for high-value products with a long sales cycle.

Additional Note: mobile devices are rapidly emerging as a dominant platform for email messaging.  WiseGuys CRM carefully configures email images for mobile devices, to expand your marketing mix .

Q: What type of organizations can benefit from WiseGuys CRM?
A: The audience seems to be growing!  Small to medium-sized catalog companies were the first adopters of WiseGuys, due largely to its superior analytical features.  Now, with the availability of CRM messaging capabilities, many organizations are taking advantage of this exciting functionality, including associations, internet-based retailers, and fund-raising organizations – all of which want more data-driven, personal interaction with their customers, donors, and constituencies.

Q: What are the unique B2B capabilities of WiseGuys CRM?
A:  DMSI recognized early on how business-to-business marketers struggle with data consolidation – specifically, rolling up transactions and reporting to the business site. WiseGuys has achieved significant innovation to meet this challenge.  All of our RFM targeting, matchback/response reporting, LTV analysis, and personalized messaging can now identify either the business entity, each customer at the business entity, or both.  You can now have a true 360 degree view of your customer accounts – which can be very hard to get otherwise.  

Q: Is data mining a part of the WiseGuys CRM solution?
A: Yes, in a big way.  Most marketers are familiar with the recommendation engine that made Amazon.com famous.  (“People who bought Product A also bought... ")

WiseGuys CRM includes an algorithm that is quite similar.  Step 1 calculates the correlation between items sold, using your own database (e.g., softballs often are purchased with bats). Step 2 launches a CrossSell email promotion to people who bought softball bats within the last 3 days, offering a softball. 

Note: this can be trickier than you would think... People who buy bats might be likely to buy balls, but people who buy balls might be more likely to buy a glove than a bat. This is one reason WiseGuys software is so useful – it does this analysis for you.

Q: How much training is needed to use WiseGuys CRM?
A: As little as 4 hours will get you started.  After initial configuration, WiseGuys CRM messaging can be auto-scheduled to run each night, with little or no operator intervention. For the analysis of your campaign results, you will probably want help interpreting your reports and we are happy to do that – it will make it easier for you to see the full power of the metrics you can get from WiseGuys.

Q: How will I know if WiseGuys CRM can jump start my marketing results? 
A: Ask for your free trial! You can use the program for 30 days risk-free, and we guarantee you will see the value of data-driven messaging. Just call DMSI at 703-941-8109 for more details.

WiseGuys was introduced in 2003 – to provide marketing analytics to direct marketers on their desktop.   In 2006, WiseGuys, received the National Center for Database (NCDM) Excellence Award, joining the ranks of companies like AOL and Dell.
Here are FAQ responses addressing the analytical functions that were instrumental in winning this award.

Q: What does WiseGuys do that other marketing software does not?
A: Smarter targeted mailings and reports. By design, most systems collect and store customer data for operational (not marketing) processing. For instance, most other systems do contact management, invoicing, credit card processing, and may do inventory control. WiseGuys picks up where they leave off - it links to their data and performs the enhanced Marketing Analysis that they lack. This includes RFM analysis, Lifetime Value Analysis, and Lapsed Customer reports.

Q: What is important about the Householding feature of WiseGuysTM?
A: True visibility of aggregate customer sales. Again, most systems collect and store customer data at the individual (contact) level. WiseGuys displays this data as well, but also "households" or consolidates the individual customer data into an organizational record. This is very valuable in a B-B environment - so that a marketer can see a roll-up of the aggregate sales activity for all the contacts in an organization.

Q: What is the importance of the WiseGuys MatchBack Response Analysis feature?
A: Response Analysis - the ability to precisely measure promotional campaign effectiveness - is the single largest unmet need for marketers. WiseGuys tracks all outgoing mailings (including batch email), and then does a "matchback" of orders against mailing records, to calculate response. In this way, marketers can evaluate the following:

• Which campaigns pay for themselves, and which do not.
• Which segments of your mailings respond the best.
• What is the staying power ("legs") of your mailings after the mail date.

Q: What was the most popular feature WiseGuys in 2006?
A: The CrossSell module - we expect this to be the most popular function in WiseGuys. CrossSell is an optional add-on module that performs specialized analysis using product purchase information. The primary function is known as Market Basket Analysis (MBA). You can also think of MBA as "Marketing By Amazon" - since they made it famous. This rare capability is not available in off-the-shelf report writer packages. It allows you to analyze product pairs: i.e. which product purchases correlate with others. For example, if a customer buys product X, what is the most likely other product he will purchase. But that is just the beginning. CrossSell goes beyond marketing analytics to marketing operational tactics. It will create a batch of customer "reminder emails" that provide a gentle reminder to customers who bought X but have not yet bought Y.

Q: What is the WiseGuys "Count Wizard" feature?
A: The RFM Count Wizard allows you to output a selected mail count that matches a budgeted count that your desire. For instance, you may want exactly 90,000 customer names: WiseGuys selects the highest scoring 90,000 records based on their RFM scores. To select the highest scoring records, WiseGuys uses "weights" pre-assigned to each RFM score. Weights can be adjusted to fit your specific business model. Alternatively, you can use the "Nth Select Wizard" to select a random group of 90,000 names from your database. Nth Select is valuable for testing. WiseGuys allows you to "hold back" a random group of customers from a mailing. In this way, you can test whether the held back group responds as well as your mailed selections.

Q: How does the WiseGuys RFM module save marketing dollars?
A: Printing and postages savings from precision targeting of promotions. Direct Marketers work hard to generate as many orders as possible from targeting a limited, highly selective number of contacts (usually through direct mail, e-mail or telemarketing). WiseGuys RFM module helps save time and money by scoring each customer and selecting just the right target audience that will achieve maximum return. By avoiding mailings to low scoring customers, WiseGuys can help avoid a great deal of wasted time, printing and postage expense.

Q: Are there other ways WiseGuys can save marketing dollars?
A: Yes, through Lifetime Value analysis (LTV). Lifetime Value analysis is the measure of customer loyalty, and will tell you how much you can afford to spend on acquiring a new customer to yield a lifetime of return. We all speak about the importance of building relationships and repeat customers - yet it is truly amazing how any marketing organization can live without this valuable tool. WiseGuys currently calculates actual Lifetime Value for MOM users, based on customer purchases. Since 2009, it is also able to calculate LTV on an organizational site level – very valuable for B-B clients.  

Q: How does WiseGuys help retain B-B customers?
A: WiseGuys promotes B-B customer loyalty by finding "lapsed customers". It prompts you for a date beyond which an organization is considered "lapsed". For instance, if you key 01/01/2001, WiseGuys will return all organization records with no orders since that date. Note that it considers all individuals at the org location when it makes this determination.

Q: How much setup is required for WiseGuys?
A: For the Mail Order Manager (MOM) version of WiseGuys, very little. WiseGuys links to 4 existing MOM tables (preferably backups). This can be setup in less than a day. For other systems, WiseGuys can be configured to link to virtually any relational database in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Q: Can't a good Report Writer like R & R or Crystal Reports accomplish the same functions?
A: No, for a number of important reasons. The biggest reason is that Report Writers typically are "read-only", and unable to pre-process and store data. Data modeling experts will tell you that pre-processing is up to 80% of the entire effort of an analysis project.

Q: What do you mean by "pre-processing"?
A: Here are the types of pre-processing that WiseGuys provides:

• Automatic householding - linking individual customers and prospects into a consolidated organization view.
• Automatic segmenting of customers into quintiles. Quintiles represent the marketing use of the 80-20 rule: where 20% of your customers generate 80% of your sales.
• Automatic assignment of RFM (Recency, Frequency, & Monetary Value) scores for each customer in your database.

Q: How is WiseGuys sold?
A: Licenses for WiseGuys are sold in 2 sizes: MOM version, and Enterprise version. Both modules run on Microsoft Access (Access not included in purchase). See our pricing page for license pricing details for each version.