Case Study

Brief

Commerzbank wanted to increase the effectiveness of its direct marketing program by better targeting its customers using offers tailored to individuals. The bank wanted to improve its ability to choose which of several products to offer the customer at any one time.

“If we have several products to offer the customer at the same time, which one do we mail?” asked Mr. Heiko Güthenke, the Head of Department. 

“We did not want to be in the situation where we were trying to sell multiple products at the same time; they would compete with each other.” 

“We wanted to be sure we only send one message to the right customer at one point in time, and do this in an analytical, optimised way. That is how we came across Marketing Optimisation in 2008.” 

Strategy

“We were using scoring for identifying customers for high affinity for product a long time ago,” 

“ Yet we needed to get to the next step of improvement in our direct marketing processes (and the business overall).”

Commerzbank therefore deployed SAS Marketing Optimisation which provides advanced analytics to enable marketers to match customers and prospects with the right campaign and the right offer, while avoiding competing messages. Marketing optimisation addresses specific objectives, while addressing multiple constraints and contact policies in ways that are mathematically superior to traditional prioritisation or rule-based systems.

Execution

Commerzbank produces hundreds of campaigns per year. Yet Marketing Optimisation has not required any significant organisation or process changes.

“Marketing Optimisation has not changed “how” we operate, but rather “to whom.”

"There have been no big organisational changes [required] in what we do,” explained the head of Marketing / CRM.

“We have adjusted timelines a bit, the “when” part of our business. The “what” can remain exactly the same if we choose. We run roughly the same campaigns. Only the customers are slightly different as Marketing Optimisation has slightly re-arranged our target groups and this affected overall affinity, and overall ROI.”

Results

• Commerzbank achieved higher levels of profitability by optimising its marketing campaigns for a range of financial products. The optimisation process ensures that the best customers are targeted for each individual product, improving conversion rates and underlying campaign profitability.
• SAS Marketing Optimisation required no significant organisation or process changes, despite the hundreds of campaigns per year produced by Commerzbank’s retail group.
• Marketing Optimisation’s data and analytics platform can potentially provide value to other groups within the organisation that can use the capabilities of this “operations research engine” on other business challenges to which powerful mathematical problem solving can be applied.

As a result of the deployment of SAS’ technology:

• Commerzbank increased profitability of its direct marketing program by 55 per cent
• Forrester Consulting calculated overall return from the SAS solution at 484 percent
• The deployment recovered its costs in less than four months