Once upon a time, direct marketing was easy. You simply designed your campaign around the marketing calendar and then selected as many of your best customers who qualified for the campaign as your budget would allow.

You may have introduced a few rules to ensure you didn’t contact the same customers with the same offer every time, but these rules were ignored when the business demanded more volume.

These days, budgets and available resources are flat or declining, creating pressure on the marketer to demonstrate continued contribution to the growth of the business, executing only those activities that will produce the best return. In the Telecoms marketplace, customers are more astute and less loyal, with ever-more diverse needs and preferences, prompting a growth in the range and complexity of products and offers available.

This is causing marketers to rethink their approach to direct marketing. Customer insight is now the key to understanding needs, aspirations and how they affect choice, so that the business can identify which customers are profitable, why, and what increases or reduces that profit. But therein lies a complex problem – insight allows marketers to improve customer relevance and profitability of their direct marketing, but with thousands or even millions of customers and multiple contact channels, how can the marketer ensure that the communications mix makes optimal use of available resources?

Marketing optimisation is Experian’s solution, enabling marketers to choose the best set of customer offers, channels and timing that maximises a campaign’s overall economic return, taking into consideration customer behaviour and expected value, whilst satisfying real-world constraints such as product targets, channel volume limitations, fixed budgets and customer contact policies.

In 2003 The Gartner Group predicted that: “A few industry leaders will begin to adopt more strategic uses of optimisation by 2007, giving them a competitive advantage.”

This is now a reality, as there are currently over 25 leading companies in the telecommunications and financial services industries using Experian’s solution to maximise return from their marketing resources.

At the European Telecom Forum in June 2007, Experian Decision Analytics presented a success story from a leading international wireless telecom provider that improved its customer up-sell revenues by 75% through optimisation, evidence that in the increasingly complex Telecom marketplace of today and tomorrow, optimisation will play a vital role in enabling companies to provide the right value-added services to the right customer.

Telecommunications is a dynamic industry, and optimisation is the dynamic solution to maximise each and every individual customer’s potential.

Jeremy Williams – Head of Optimisation Consulting, Experian Decision Analytics - From the session held at the Experian Decision Analytics Telco Forum 2007

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