Business Intelligence for Marketing Campaigns
A ten year old company with more than 1000% growth might find it easy to coast on existing sales for a while. But for MarketLab of Caledonia, Michigan, 216 on Inc. magazine's list of The 500 Fastest Growing Companies last year just wasn't good enough. MarketLab's CMO, Steven Bosio, wanted better intelligence about his company's marketing performance - and he wanted it faster. So he worked with MarketLab's CIO, Paul Gebben, and enlisted BlueGranite to help the MarketLab team understand which marketing campaigns were delivering results and which ones weren't.
MarketLab is a specialty laboratory equipment distributor that operates primarily through catalog sales. From research to healthcare to clinical laboratories, MarketLab prides itself on stocking one of the broadest and deepest inventories of hard to find and unique laboratory equipment available. As a primary sales channel, understanding the performance of each catalog campaign is critical to MarketLab's continued success. And although Gebben's IT team had developed Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables to enable basic analysis, compiling the mailing list performance data could take up to a week before any analysis was even possible. And the extent of the analysis was limited.
Enter BlueGranite. After working with MarketLab to understand their business intelligence needs, BlueGranite designed a marketing performance engine that will enable continuous and ongoing campaign analysis and response. The system is built on Microsoft SQL Server with a data mart designed around the principles of data modeling Guru Ralph Kimball's highly lauded methodology. It includes OLAP cubes that operate a metrics analysis component, enabling a series of analytical views and reports related to customer, order and product data and history for everyday use.
This kind of live, "real-time" analysis capability will do much more than enable MarketLab to custom tailor marketing campaigns for increased sales. Better information about sales patterns will help MarketLab track customer demand. And that information can ensure better inventory management and better customer service. With this kind of forward thinking, it is easy to understand MarketLab's continued success.