The information contained herein is proprietary to Decision Software, Inc. and is provided solely for the benefit of our customers and potential customers. Thisinformation shall not be disclosed, in whole or in part, to any other party without prior written approval.
ABOUT DSI... 3
ABOUT MARKETWIDE ... 4
Overview ... 4
Connectivity and Scalability ... 4
MarketWide Architecture ... 4
CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT ... 6
One Pass Processing ... 6
Automatic Deduplication ... 6
Calculations on the Fly ... 7
Splitting and Nthing ... 7
Other Features ... 8
DATA MINING AND ANALYSIS ... 10
MarketTrak Response Reporting ... 10
DataMiner Report Builder ... 10
Custom Reports ... 11
OTHER MARKETWIDE FEATURES ... 12
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION... 13
Try Before You Buy ... 13
A
BOUT
DSI
Decision Software Inc. is a campaign management software vendor and database provider located in Lanham, MD. We are privately owned, self-funded, and profitable.
Founded by Jeffrey Fowler in 1989, DSI initially provided software and database consulting services. At that time, Mr. Fowler created a then-remarkable 50 million record database spanning 6 gigabytes of storage on a 486 computer. In 1993, he developed a software application known as TopDog that simplified and automated common marketing queries. TopDog was unique from other campaign management offerings in that it performed complex segmentation against relational databases using a single query and making a single pass of the data. The TopDog program continued to be enhanced until 2004, when it was replaced by MarketWide.
MarketWide takes campaign management to an entirely new level by allowing queries and campaigns to be run through the Internet, while still performing single-pass segmentation. It runs and manages campaigns to consumer (B2C), businesses (B2B), and households (B2H). It offers unmatched segmentation, automation and scheduling, event triggers, response reporting, and data mining.
An incredibly flexible piece of software, MarketWide was not designed with any particular industry in mind, and because of this it is used in service bureaus, manufacturers, catalogers, non-profit organizations, newspapers, publishers, financial institutions, energy providers, and other business-to-business and business-to-consumer industries. Some of these companies have extremely complex database structures and multiple database servers. Our largest installation has over 1.2 billion records.
A
BOUT
M
ARKET
W
IDE
O
VERVIEW
MarketWide connects to practically any relational platform, and provides a simple and easy method for your users to run direct marketing campaigns, generate reports, mine data, and find useful information about your customers from anywhere regardless of the location of your database. Typical MarketWide users are non-technical marketing personnel. People familiar with standard office applications usually learn MarketWide with less than two days of training, and knowledge of programming languages is not necessary.
C
ONNECTIVITY AND
S
CALABILITY
MarketWide works with a range of databases and servers, including Oracle and SQL Server. There are no limits on the number of records that may be queried. In terms of scalability, current installations range from small (200,000 records) to huge (over a billion records). Campaigns can consist of thousands of segments. Database platforms range from Intel/Windows-based
hardware to multi-million dollar multiprocessor UNIX systems.
M
ARKET
W
IDE
A
RCHITECTURE
MarketWide uses “N-Tier” architecture. This means it can run on a single machine, or across multiple computers to achieve maximum performance. A typical installation uses one machine to run the MarketWide Host process, which communicates with the database running on another computer. The end users communicate with the MarketWide Host from their desktops, using the MarketWide Client.
Initial installation is simple and takes less than a day to be fully up and running. The
MarketWide Host is installed and configured using a simple setup program and configuration utility, while the MarketWide Client is as easy as running a small installer. Changes and updates are automatically distributed through the web.
“We use DSI’s campaign
management software for many of our clients, and find it very flexible and powerful. DSI develops quality marketing software at a reasonable price.”
Jim Spillane
VP Database Services
Anchor Computer
Because only the MarketWide Host communicates with the database and performs calculations, client computers need not be powerful machines. Furthermore, since settings and reports are saved on the host, you can access your queries from work, home, or any secure Internet location. You can schedule reports or campaigns to run automatically, and because they run on the
MarketWide Host, you don’t need to leave your computer on. You can begin a campaign at work and check its status at home. You can even have MarketWide run queries or campaigns by sending an email!
C
AMPAIGN
M
ANAGEMENT
MarketWide’s campaign management module is called PromoTrak. PromoTrak selects
customers or prospects based on a practically limitless set of criteria. It allows your selection to be reduced (or nthed), assigns keycodes for response reporting, and allows match cells to be split into multiple test and control groups. After your campaign selection is complete, PromoTrak saves the campaign history in your database and outputs your solicitation files.
O
NE
P
ASS
P
ROCESSING
PromoTrak creates a single SQL query for a campaign, and its unique segmentation engine makes only ONE pass of your data, greatly reducing the amount of time that it takes to perform queries. There is no limit to the number of segments you can have in a campaign. With a conventional approach, many campaign management systems would have to generate 1,500 SQL queries in order to run a campaign of 1,500 segments. PromoTrak and the single pass approach can do it with just one, creating an astonishing performance advantage. MarketWide can process over a hundred million records in a single hour!
A
UTOMATIC
D
EDUPLICATION
PromoTrak’s powerful one-pass segmentation engine automatically selects each customer or prospect only once, regardless of the number of times they actually qualify for the campaign. Many competitive products require a separate stop to deduplicate between segments, meaning more time and a greater use of resources.
Them
1. Multiple Cells (Segments) in the Campaign 2. Multiple SQL Statements Running in the Database 3. Multiple Outputs
4. Time Consuming Duplication Removal Process 5. Final Output
Us
1. Multiple Cells (Segments) in the Campaign 2. One SQL Statement Running in the Database 3. Final Automatically Unduplicated Output
C
ALCULATIONS ON THE
F
LY
PromoTrak is unique in that it performs variable calculations on the fly. In order to achieve adequate performance, many open architecture campaign management products require you to precalculate variables on your database. This limits the types of questions that you are able to ask. PromoTrak’s segmentation engine performs extremely complex customer selections that are not possible through conventional database queries. Take, for example, this statement: “Select
customers who spent at least $500 lifetime and bought products A and B but never C, and made at least one purchase between Date1 and Date2, where A, B, and C and Date1 and Date2 arbitrary products and dates.” Other tools require you to precalculate this information before you can run the query,
forcing you to undergo a very costly and time consuming data preparation stage. However, MarketWide easily performs these calculations on the fly by reading transactional data.
PromoTrak is able to make complex campaigns with little effort.
S
PLITTING AND
N
THING
Once you’ve run the selection portion of your campaign, PromoTrak allows you to split one or more segments and perform nths. Splitting a segment is often done to establish test and control groups, use different channels (direct mail, email, telemarketing), or try different offers to see which one works better. Nthing a segment allows you to control precisely how many customers or prospects you solicit, both for the entire marketing campaign as well as for each segment within a campaign.
Splits can be performed both randomly as well as by value. For example, you might split one segment into two random groups and another by income or gender.
Nths can be keyed in as a fixed number (e.g., 1000) or as a percentage (e.g., 50%). PromoTrak can perform nths randomly, arithmetically (e.g., keep every other record),
and even on a ranked basis (e.g., keep the top 1000 based on model score).
PromoTrak boasts a rich set of splitting and nthing features
M
ULTIWAVE
C
AMPAIGNS
On occasion, you may wish to set up a multi-faceted campaign that follows customer’s responses to stages of a solicited campaign. MarketWide’s Multiwave feature allows you to do just that by establishing a series of touches to the same universe of people. Often times, campaigns will distribute solicitations multiple times if the first attempt or ‘effort’ fails to illicit a response. MarketWide allows you to easily create a Multiwave Campaign that will track those that reply and remove them from the remaining efforts.
You can use the Scheduler module to automate these campaigns which can be set to notify you when they run.
O
THER
F
EATURES
We believe that PromoTrak is more powerful than any other campaign management system on the market. In addition to its unrivaled power and performance, PromoTrak provides many more features for marketers to perform and manage their campaigns.
Promotion Templates – allows you to set up standard campaign categories and “memorize” various business rules within the template.
Includes and Excludes – automated features let you choose to re-solicit (include) or exclude customers from previous campaigns.
Promotion History – automatically keeps track of everyone you solicit, allowing you to analyze your campaigns by using MarketWide’s integrated campaign performance report application, MarketTrak.
Solicit File Output – easily generates your solicit file with a single mouse click. Your solicit file format can be edited and saved through standard system options. You can even output different segments within your campaign to different output files, allowing you to do things such as send some segments to a mail house and others to a call center.
D
ATA
M
INING AND
A
NALYSIS
M
ARKET
T
RAK
R
ESPONSE
R
EPORTING
MarketWide’s MarketTrak program allows you to easily generate campaign analysis and response reports for a single marketing campaign or across multiple campaigns. Using
information from your promotion history and response tables, MarketTrak quickly compiles data to analyze campaign success.
MarketTrak lets you analyze campaign performance
With an intuitive and easy-to-use wizard interface, MarketTrak walks you through the process of selecting promotion history and response tables and defining variables, and then preserves these settings within a template for subsequent usage. MarketTrak includes advanced capabilities such multiple response definitions, user defined expressions, formulas, and print formats. You can also control how to summarize output. MarketTrak report output can be saved in MS Excel, HTML, PDF, or MS Word (RTF) formats.
DataMiner lets you build these queries at any level of detail and can answer questions ranging from simple (e.g. “How many customers do I have?”) to complex (e.g. “Generate a three-dimensional cross tab showing average sales and volume, by product, manufacturer, and fiscal year quarter”).
A powerful feature of DataMiner is its built-in interface to PromoTrak. With a simple right-click of the mouse, you can automatically feed segments of interest directly into a marketing campaign without having to recreate the query.
This DataMiner cross tab calculates total order amount by origin year and gender
DataMiner lets you choose how to group, filter, and summarize your data with a few simple mouse clicks. Report output is displayed in a spreadsheet-style window, from which it can be saved, printed, or copied and pasted directly into other Windows applications, such as Excel and Lotus. As with other MarketWide reports, your queries can be saved and retrieved, modified, and resubmitted as needed.
C
USTOM
R
EPORTS
MarketWide supports Business Intelligence (BI) reports with its custom reports feature. Custom reports are created using MarketWide REXX, a built-in SQL interface language. You can write your own reports or have us write them for you!
O
THER
M
ARKET
W
IDE
F
EATURES
DataExport – lets you extract data to fixed or delimited text files, based on queries and filters you provide.
QueryBuilder – allows you to pick and choose fields to display, apply filters, sort and aggregate data, and run sub queries. Output can be exported or displayed in a window, where it can be copied to the clipboard or saved to a file.
External Processes –incorporate custom built processes into MarketWide. Any executable can be used as an external process.
External Folders – allow you to integrate ftp sites or local network folders into MarketWide which can then be seamlessly accessed from the open/save dialog. Packages – gives the ability to run multiple queries in an automatic sequence. These
queries can include external processes.
AdHoc Query – provides users familiar with SQL the ability to enter and execute SQL commands directly. It also lets you view and edit SQL code from point-and-click queries generated in other MarketWide applications, such as DataMiner.
Expression Wizard – lets you build and save your own complex functions, such as date arithmetic, with an easy-to-use interface. A full set of numeric, character, and date/time functions are included. Once created, an expression can be used anywhere within MarketWide.
MarketWide Catalog – is used to customize the way data is displayed for your users. Among other things, this simple tool allows you to set up picklists, lookups, print formats, and descriptions, and to attach drill-downs.
A
DDITIONAL
I
NFORMATION
T
RY
B
EFORE
Y
OU
B
UY
Evaluating an application such as MarketWide can be hard without seeing it run against your own data. To prove we are as good as we say we are, we will be happy to run a live
demonstration using your own data and selection criteria. Here’s how it works: You can...
Have us sign a confidentiality agreement Send us an extract of your data
Specify the campaign(s) you want to run And we will...
Load a database with your sample data Run your queries while you watch
You can visit our office for the demonstration or we can come to your place. If we meet your objectives, you cover our costs. Otherwise you pay nothing. We'll let you know
the exact cost of your test before we start. Should you decide to move ahead with the project, your money (less travel) is applied. There’s nothing to lose!
R
ETURN ON
I
NVESTMENT
In terms of value, DSI’s prices are among the best in the industry, and typically range from 25% to 50% of our closest competitors. This cost effective pricing has occurred in part because:
As a smaller company we have much less overhead to support; DSI is not, and never has been, in debt.
We’ve been selling campaign management software since 1992 and a large percentage of the sales revenue has been invested into product enhancements, in contrast with
competitors who’ve launched massive development efforts to bring a product to market and are now trying to recoup huge investments and satisfy shareholders.