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There was a time, not so long ago, when a 28-day delivery was considered acceptable in the mail order business. These days, of course, consumers are used to instant gratification and expect things rather more quickly.

So do the direct marketers pitching for their custom.

For those brought up on a regime of putting in requests to the IT team every time you want to take a closer look at your database, then waiting days or weeks for an answer, the old ways of working are no longer up to the job. Direct marketers today want instant access to their data, and they don't want to go through specialist SAS- or SPSS-trained analysts to get it.

A survey conducted last October by Alterian - which provides marketing and customer insight software to enable marketers to analyse customer data on their own desktop - found that 84 per cent of in-house marketers aspire to conduct data analysis on their own desktop, or at the very least, within their own department.

A huge 68 per cent of respondents identified selection and segmentation of data as the most important factor when planning a campaign. And more than 36 per cent of respondents admitted to waiting days, or weeks, to receive the results, due to the lack of appropriate tools.

The sample size was small at just 116 in-house marketers, but the results confirm the impression that direct marketers are looking to run more discrete campaigns, more frequently, targeted at increasingly smaller groups of similar-looking customers, in preference to the one-size-fits-all approach of a few years ago.

"Precision, segmentation and targeting have really come to the fore over the past six months," says Alterian chief executive officer David Eldridge.

"Marketers in the US are being driven by potential legislation around privacy, and their response is to make appropriate offers to appropriate people through the appropriate channels, so they are less likely to cause offence." In the UK, meanwhile, Eldridge points to what he calls "a stronger targeting culture", which is driving uptake of Alterian and similar products.

There are, in fact, no shortages of such tools for marketers to turn to, and many of them can be seen at this year's Technology for Marketing show, on 10 and 11 February at Olympia, London (see panel, p38).

Although each has its own points of difference, they all offer similar functionality. In essence, these tools allow a marketer to interrogate their database at great speed and with great ease, without needing much in the way of statistical expertise. It's all point-and-click, drag-and-drop. So long as your data is up to the task - and don't just assume it is - however you want to slice and dice it, it's easy.

So, instead of mailing all the women on your customer database, just choose the ones who have bought from you in the past six months, or whose lifetime value exceeds x, or who live within x miles of one of your stores.

Or all three combined, if you wish.

Crosstabs, Venn diagrams, nice, colourful, visual representations of complex statistical analysis are at the marketer's fingertips - at the click of a mouse. If you don't like the look of the results in graphical form, reach for the pull-down menu and it's a pie chart.

Rules of the game

Many of the programs also include campaign management modules to enable the marketer to automate campaigns by setting up business rules. For example, anyone who responds to the postal mailing pack automatically receives a phone call to follow up their interest, 24 hours later. Some also include modelling modules, which use customers' previous purchasing behaviour as the basis for predicting their future behaviour.

But, if a demo of one of these systems seems a bit like a magic show, it should be remembered that they are doing far more than simply painting pretty pictures. They are enabling marketers to get to grips with their data and create campaigns quickly and easily, to target customers more accurately, and to run campaigns aimed at tiny, but perhaps highly promising or responsive, groups if that's what they wish to do.

"It's all about empowerment," says Bill Mooney, sales director of the data solution division of the GB Group, which has a number of Alterian-based solutions.

"These tools can drive significant productivity improvements in any business.

They have an enormous value in their own right by virtue of the cost reductions and profitable opportunities they present."

Roger Luxton, head of consultancy for MarkIT, which also develops and markets a solution based on the Alterian engine, called MarketManager ACE, agrees: "If companies take these tools on for the right reason, it changes the balance of power," he says.

"It takes the power off the analytical teams and gives it back to the marketers. They decide what they want to do, when they want to run campaigns and what type of campaigns they want to run."

Mail order company Express gifts has been using MarkIT's MarketManager ACE for the past nine months. Using the software, says marketing database manager Dave Roberts, the company can prepare campaigns much faster and do dummy runs to see what would happen if they used given selections as the basis for a campaign.

"This would once have been a three- or four-day process in IT, so one live run is all we could get," he says. "Now we can run through it in advance to see what the campaign would look like and amend it if we need to."

So, how do the highly trained and expensive IT analysts feel about all this? According to Alterian's Eldridge, they are hardly crying over their keyboards.

"These guys don't like doing what they see as very basic queries." he says.

"They want to test themselves and use their skills and expertise to build sophisticated models that add value to the business."

And this, says Dave Parfitt, CRM consultant at Teradata, is what tends to happen in practice. When Teradata client British Airways deployed the company's Teradata CRM analysis and campaign management software 18 months ago, the airline's SAS analysts were soon pulled off the routine list-pulling and query work and asked to focus their skills and their energies on more sophisticated attrition and customer acquisition modelling work.

Experience counts

Clearly, the day you take delivery of one of these tools is not the day to lay off the specialist analysts. The smartest bit of software in the world can't replace years of experience of working with statistics, says Karen Harding, pre-sales consultant at The Database Group. "It all depends on the questions you are asking, and on the marketer and how numerate he or she is," she says.

"A lot of these programs have a modelling module which does regression analysis and so forth. A statistician will know that two variables which are co-dependent on each other should not be included in the same model.

Some of this is logic, and a numerate marketer with a good brain in their head could do it. But you always need to take care in the translation of results, and that's where the statistician's expertise comes in."

Emma Chablo, marketing director at smartFOCUS, agrees: "What we do, and what SAS or SPSS does are complementary," she says. "We don't ever suggest that anyone should throw out their SAS or SPSS technology in favour of what we provide." But as Chablo points out, this in no way undermines the value of these tools. "Until recently, marketers have not had specific technology for marketing," she says.

"If you look at finance or sales order processing, they have specific applications that help those people do their job. But marketing has not had that. It has relied on Excel spreadsheets and bits of databases. Tools like smart-FOCUS Intelligent Marketing have been developed specifically to help the marketer."

The consensus seems to be that the imaginary line between what a marketer equipped with one of these tools can do and what he still needs the SAS team to help with, seems to fall between analysis and predictive modelling.

It's in the complex modelling arena where the statistician's skills are most needed. But even for the more routine analysis and segmentation work, some understanding of data is essential, argues Ian Hitt, sales and marketing director of Identex, another company whose solution, Identex Visual Miner, uses the Alterian engine.

"You have to start by asking what are your expectations, your key requirements, your business drivers and the ROI or business benefit model you are looking at before you decide whether you need one of these tools," he says.

"Then, when you get one, you need a good understanding of data and of your own database and how it is structured. Anyone can point and click, but you need to understand what is behind the data and what the information means to your business to get any value from it."

The good news is, according to vendors, these tools can quickly pay for themselves by cutting the cost of wasted mailings, freeing up expensive SAS/SPSS resource, and by targeting customers more accurately, thereby improving response and conversion rates.

"These tools are enabling marketers to do things they could not do before," says Carol Meyers, head of marketing at Unica, which has developed the Affinium solution for marketers.

"That is to initiate and run campaigns in hours rather than days, to reduce the size of campaigns and do many micro-campaigns, hitting the customer at a time when they are interested, and with an offer they are interested in."

Meyers claims that one US client, Keybank, calculated that it would save $1.2m in the first year of using the tool, while in the UK, Marks and Spencer Money paid for its investment in the software within a year through the IT savings it enabled.

With ROI statistics like those, it's no surprise that interest in Affinium and similar tools, is growing.

David Murphy is a freelance journalist

SHOW PREVIEW: TECHNOLOGY FOR MARKETING 2004
How to register
Register for free by visiting www.t-f-m.co.uk
When and where February 10-11, Tuesday 10am-5pm, Wednesday 10am-5pm. The
National Hall, Olympia, London

How to get there

By tube: The nearest station is Kensington Olympia which is on the District Line and adjacent to The National Hall. Services arrive and depart every 15 minutes.

By road: It's easier to get to Olympia using public transport, but there are 660 car park spaces on-site and others close by. For more information visit Olympia's official website at www.eco.co.uk

Event profile

The TFM is the only UK event dedicated to helping marketers implement technology in their marketing strategies. There will be 200 leading suppliers covering all aspects of marketing and CRM technologies, including customer relationship management, customer data and analysis, customer contact and interaction, new media and web, and e-mail and mobile. An advice centre will be on hand, sponsored by data analysis consultancy dunnhumby and more than 30 case study-led seminars, daily keynotes and an internet cafe sponsored by smartFOCUS.

Exhibitors include

EHSBrann Discovery, Microsoft Business Solutions, Broadsystem, Adobe Systems UK, GB Group, Thomson Directories, SmartFOCUS, Experian, Inbox Media, Mardev, Institute of Sales and Marketing Management and many more.