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: How does WiseGuys CrossSell work?
A: CrossSell is an Access based module that performs the following: 1. Computes the percentage of time that two products are purchased together, and creates a Product Pair table. A new feature is that both products need not be purchased in the same order. CrossSell uses a "Product Pair Window" to establish whether a cross selling event really occurred. In your example, a customer who purchased a baseball bat within 30 days of buying a baseball could be considered a Product Pair. If they purchased ice skates 6 months after they bought the baseball, this would not be a Product Pair.

2. Optionally, CrossSell can launch an email to each customer who bought a baseball, but failed to buy the bat. The email is gently worded:

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. It will include a calculation for Forecasted LTV in a future release.

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: What is new for the MOM version of WiseGuys in 2007?
A: Real-time Integration with MOM. The advantages of this feature to MOM users are dramatic - WiseGuys can now use our MatchBack Response Analysis to calculate the success of your telemarketing campaigns. Also, with the availability of up-to-the-minute customer purchase history, WiseGuys is now able to send cross-sell emails throughout the day.

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 Pricing page for license details for each version.