ProList’s ProQuery solution helps a prominent Specialty Publisher get control of their marketing database
When you’re in the business of improving your clients’ organizational performance, it’s a no-brainer that your customer database needs to be a top performer too.
Situation
Managing a database of 45,000 alumni, students and prospects isn’t easy, especially when you’re short on staff. For this corporate director of marketing, finding a mailhouse that was as good at building and managing a database as getting the mail out was key to the success of her company’s revenue stream.
The marketing director was seeing her promotional and catalog mailings bogged down by a cumbersome customer database that had mutated into five versions and had become increasingly unwieldy for pulling crucial selection criteria. She needed a turnkey solution that could allow her small staff to turn around targeted postal and email campaigns, mine data and create new lists and direct mail campaigns on a dime.
Solution
After a review of several prominent direct marketing service providers she hired ProList. ProList offered the perfect combination of database expertise and responsive customer service that she needed for her demanding mailing schedule.
ProList performed a comprehensive analysis of the existing database. Armed with those findings and our QueryPro solution, we developed a new web-based database management solution that consolidated all of the separate databases, including in-house and outside list purchases into a single, responsive, user-friendly resource. This allowed virtually any staff member to easily identify a mailing universe and procure a custom mailing from data to delivery in minutes. The database is also an invaluable marketing tool as it allows users to pull lists according to a wide variety of customer behavior and data including opt-in email and student profiles. Track response. Generate reports. Access data from any location with Internet access. Even coordinate work with printers more efficiently.
In short, it enabled our client to seize control over its customer information so that it could build and manage its marketing campaigns quickly and painlessly. Performance issue? Resolved.
Results
With the new system in place, our client was able to free up valuable time and staff capacity to perform research and other critical functions that would have previously been spent jousting with the old database. And the extra productivity and speed delivered by our solution enabled the director of marketing to save money by eliminating the need to hire a database analyst and a production manager.
In addition, through seminars and updates, we’ve helped our client maintain compliance with constantly changing postal regulations, and made sure its mailings arrived at their destinations in a timely fashion through Mail Tracking – a groundbreaking tracking application that we also designed. Go ahead—ask other mail houses if those items are on their resumes.
All in all, our partnership with this client yielded a more streamlined and flexible direct mail operation, less stress, greater cost efficiency and a relationship that has lasted for 10 years running. In the words of the director of marketing, “To us, ProList is nothing less than another division of our business.”
We don’t like to brag about ourselves. But we can’t help it if our clients want to.
