Fingerhut Cos. said it is saving millions of dollars in direct marketing costs using analytic software from SAS Institute to streamline catalog operations.
“We use SAS to build unique models for each of our catalog marketing campaigns to predict which customers are likely to respond to different offers,” said Randy Erdahl, director of business intelligence at Minnetonka, MN-based Fingerhut. “We use the SAS models to score customers and identify the appropriate offers. By using SAS to eliminate wasteful catalog mailings we realized a 6- to 7-percent reduction in direct marketing costs, a significant savings.”
This effort recently was extended to include Fingerhut's e-mail campaigns, outbound telemarketing campaigns and Web site activity.
“We've started to capture Web behavior so we can identify certain abandonment areas on our Web site and how often customers have been hitting certain product categories,” Erdahl said. “We'll combine this data with the purchase data we already have to obtain a cross-channel view of our customers. Fingerhut is a data-driven company and it's our heritage to be analytical and driven from a customer data viewpoint.”
