WiseGuys CRM
Drive Response – Deliver ROI
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:
WiseGuys CRM FAQ
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.
“More to the point - and this is the hallmark of a
good small business
product, it (WiseGuys) provides the refinements
needed to make a
system usable in the real world."
- David Raab,
Raab Associates
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 .
“All
marketing media can be full analyzed within one tool
– that’s pretty
powerful.”
- Joe Dodds, Rapids Wholesale Equipment, WiseGuys
user since 2005
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.
WiseGuysTM ANALYTICS FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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.