CARY, NC (Jul. 07, 2009) – By using SAS Analytics to target its marketing campaigns more precisely, the National Geographic Society has seen a return on investment of 200 to 300 percent, with the best-performing customer segments realizing 50 percent overall campaign performance improvement.
One of the biggest challenges for National Geographic is optimizing marketing efficiency across multiple departments and product lines. The answer: Gather customer information into one central marketing database that provides a 360-degree view of its customers.
“We handle marketing analysis for our direct-response divisions – magazines, books, videos, catalog, e-mail and travel,” said David Harkness, National Geographic’s Marketing Analysis Manager. “It all converges in the marketing database. By gathering transactional data we get a single view of what, where and how often a customer is interacting with us. Predictive analytics from SAS help us better understand our customers and determine which products and offers are the most relevant.
“Not only are we forecasting with greater accuracy which customers are highly interested in our products and services, we can simultaneously better identify underperforming customer segments with SAS.”
In addition to the power of SAS predictive analytics, National Geographic chose SAS for its flexibility and support. “The breadth of resources available on SAS is staggering,” added Harkness. “Between user groups, educational forums, official documentation and SAS sales and technical support you can pretty much figure anything out. I’ve been using SAS for 13 years, and I am still finding new things I can accomplish with it.”
An integrated suite of top-ranked marketing solutions
While many enterprise marketing management vendors are narrowly focused on point solutions, SAS’ comprehensive suite of top-ranked products spans the entire customer-focused marketing process. SAS’ campaign management capabilities, part of a broader customer intelligence suite of solutions, handle campaign management, cross-sell/up-sell, customer retention, customer segmentation, e-mail marketing, event-driven marketing, campaign optimization, marketing mix analysis, marketing performance management and Web analytics.
Customers worldwide using SAS to support customer initiatives include 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, The Dow Chemical Co., First Citizens Bank, Loyalty Management UK and US Bank.
About National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society is one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations. Founded in 1888 to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge, the Society works to inspire people to care about the planet. It reaches more than 360 million people worldwide each month through its official journal, National Geographic, and other magazines; National Geographic Channel; television documentaries; music; radio; films; books; DVDs; maps; exhibitions; live events; school publishing programs; interactive media; and merchandise. National Geographic has funded more than 9,000 scientific research, conservation and exploration projects and supports an education program promoting geographic literacy. For more information, visit nationalgeographic.com.
About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know® .
