Total Cost of Ownership

What is the cost of a database marketing solution? For many companies, database marketing initiatives have been limited by the perceptions of substantial, upfront, capital investment for a large IT infrastructure.

Directive has changed this landscape, delivering Customer Asset Management through a shared, hosted data center environment.

Directive's Marketing Data Mart environment encompasses all of the core functionality of several different database marketing components:

• A customer data integration solution that maps incoming POS data to a standardized data model.
• Data hygiene, postal standardization and advanced de-duplication tools to clean and combine customer records, enabling a single view of the customer.
• A powerful, enterprise-class relational database for rapid retrieval of targeted consumer lists.
• A marketing dashboard for real-time reporting of on-going marketing campaigns.
• A statistical workbench powering advanced algorithms, including cluster analysis, logistic regression and neural networks, to predict consumer behavior.
• Campaign setup and execution tools to drive outbound efforts through print, e-mail and telemarketing channels.

To bring this solution to a new generation of corporate users, Directive has sourced best-in-class components from a variety of software companies, and combined them in a shared services, hosted database environment. This provides significant economies of scale and allows many technology costs to be shared across a range of clients, reducing the cost to each one. Corporate marketing departments should evaluate the cost of a database marketing solution in terms of several factors:

• What are you currently spending with direct mail fulfillment firms to "clean up" mailing lists for each campaign?
• Do you have a system to keep track of customer address changes and ensure that marketing messages are getting delivered?
• What is the cost, in terms of redundancy and loss of customer goodwill, from duplicated and off-target marketing messages?
• Do you have a "single source of truth" about each customer, to enable you to truly identify the most valuable segments of your customer file?