David Shepard Associates Blog

In this edition of the David Shepard Associates Newsletter we highlight four of the more timely issues in our industry.
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Which is cheaper? Some claim hosted. There is the age-old argument of mark-up versus leverage. Some say if you do it in-house, you can avoid the mark-up of everything that is done by the service bureau. That is true to some degree. The other argument is that the service bureau can leverage equipment and resources across multiple clients. That is also true to some degree. It all comes down to:
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First, let me state that I am a fan of optimization. The concept of selecting the proper product to promote using the best channel makes considerably more sense to me than traditional product centric approaches which may degenerate into the senior product marketing manager getting access to the best customers.

That said, the way in which the optimization software is being marketed to marketing management, appears to dismiss some of the major factors that must be addressed in order to make its use successful. This paper is intended to identify these complicating factors so that they as they surface marketeers are at least aware of them and can work on solutions to address them.
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Recently, I’ve had a number of discussions with other direct marketers who called after reading the Wall Street Journal’s June 24th article on how direct marketers like Williams-Sonoma, LL Bean, and Neiman Marcus have found new ways to use ZIP Code data to screen mailing lists and cut costs.
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Previously, I wrote a column that dealt with the possibility, actually the probability, that different segments of your customer file may behave differently with regard to their relationships with well known key predictor variables such as Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value and various measures of Product Purchase data.
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Statistics & Modeling For Direct Marketers 
  08/13/08 Boston, MA
  09/23/08 Chicago, IL
  12/11/08 New York, NY
  01/27/09 Costa Mesa, CA
  03/18/09 New York, NY
  04/28/09 Washington, DC

New Methods In Direct Marketing And Online Media Testing
Sunil Gupta, Ph.D.
Wednesday, June 10

Want to drive higher responses and find a wealth of viable prospects in your database?

You’ll have to brave a bit of math. That is, you must segment your file and apply predictive models to it. And that’s a complex task. Above all, you have to know what models can and can’t do.
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Best Practices in Customer Analytics, Sponsored By Alterian
  David Shepard, Rus Rempala & Debbie Megee
  Thursday, March 20th 10:00am CST    

Register at:   http://www.dsadirect.com/events.shtml

Alterian has partnered with David Shepard Associates to provide an on-premise version of the Alterian Marketing Services Platform in North America.

The Alterian Marketing Services Platform includes integrated analysis, campaign planning, multichannel execution, reporting and marketing operations capabilities.
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