You may notice that marketing is changing. Fewer credit card offers are hitting your mailbox. Fewer coupons for irrelevant products and services. There is a reason for the change. Organizations are beginning to understand that mass marketing alienates customers. Spray and pray doesn't work - so organizations aren't spending their money on it any longer - at least not to the degree that we used to see. In the next few years, as mass marketing continues to diminish, loyalty from consumer to brands should increase, and the trust that marketers earn from consumers will become more noticeable.

So that's then, but this is now. What are organizations doing now to focus on customer decision management? What are brands doing to make sure that the offers they deliver are personalized and relevant?

In May 2014, SAS commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examined the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying SAS Real-Time Decision Manager - our solution for customer decision management.

The purpose of this study was to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Real-Time Decision Manager (RTDM) on their organizations. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks, Forrester interviewed an existing customer — a retail bank — with more than a year of experience using RTDM.

The bank’s goal was to build an integrated platform for CRM and Risk Management that would allow it to launch preapproved, relevant cross-selling campaigns on an individual customer level. Specifically, the bank wanted to pursue new, low-income customer segments for offering small-amount credit products. “We integrated a decision management system (SAS RTDM) with our CRM solutions and scoring application to create a powerful and flexible instrument,” said the chief of the bank’s credit strategies division.

As a result of using SAS RTDM, the bank is able to:

• Target lower risk consumers with significantly greater accuracy.
• Reduce time required to approve loans through improved customer targeting combined with automated business rules .
• Adjust its strategy every month based on time reduction to approve loans.

This study revealed real, quantified benefits of using SAS RTDM, specifically that the bank now:

• Issues 25% more loans with the same staff, an improvement valued at more than $5.4million.
• Eliminates IT development requirements, which is valued at $242,250.

Forward-looking companies are making the transformation from mass marketing to managing each individual journey from researcher - to purchaser - to loyal advocate. And they're doing it with analytics-based marketing software like SAS Customer Intelligence solutions, such as SAS RTDM. We'll see some interesting developments as more and more organizations evolve toward this new approach to marketing. So that leaves this question - are you ready to move from mass marketing to customer decision management?

For more details about this fascinating story of the bank's transformation by using SAS RTDM, check out the full study and let me know what you think.  And as always - thank you for following!