Rewind to the summer of 2009.

Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody was burning up the charts, Pixar’s Up was collecting a fistful of Academy Award nominations, and SAS’ marketing organization was committing to take our digital marketing efforts to another level.

SAS, deeply interested with the challenge of nurturing sas.com visitors, decided to set a twofold goal: (1) improve the experience of our online visitors; and (2) make a distinction between visitors ‘just browsing’ and those ‘ready to buy’. To make that happen, we had to learn more about visitor behavior and work to apply that knowledge to deliver relevant content. Lucky for us, the insight we needed could be delivered with software developed right here at SAS.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2010.

Using SAS Software, we have a technology pilot running and can already see results. Two measures worth mentioning:

1. Our click-thru rates have soared up to 12%
2. We’ve impacted more than $1.5 million in the sales pipeline.

Not bad, considering the pilot has only been running six months. What have we done?

So far, we’ve completed two phases of the project. Phase one focused on creating a lead nurturing program using SAS CI Studio and SAS Digital Marketing, and phase two focused on customer and prospect data integration. Phase three, started in July, is focused on using SAS Marketing Optimization to optimize email marketing lists across all U.S. field marketing campaigns.”

Stay tuned. Over the next few months I’ll continue to post about our efforts, success, and frustrations. Chime in with any questions or requests for further details.