Apteco Ltd is pleased to announce that the Best use of FastStats 2009 award winner is the London based database consultancy Planning-inc, for their FastStats implementation for Argos. The winner and five runners up were announced at the FastStats User Group Conference which was held at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire on Friday 6th November. (Photo: Rachel Morgan, Planning Director, Planning-inc (left) and James Alty, Managing Director, Apteco Ltd (right)
Planning-inc’s challenge was to improve Argos’ 600 million row eCRM system from monthly to weekly refreshes and to provide the Argos marketing team with direct access for analysis and campaign planning. Planning-inc undertook a redevelopment of the existing database to facilitate more rapid data loading. They then provided Argos with the FastStats Discovererfront end solution and powerful FastStats Excelsior reports to ensure consistent business reporting, where time can be spent interpreting, not finding the results. Extraordinarily this huge database project with many feeds and reports was completed within a strict timeline and with no previous experience of delivering a FastStats system.
The five runners up also submitted very strong entries and Callcredit Marketing Solutions and Norfolkline in particular were highly commended by the judges for their joint entry. Their use of FastStats Discoverer to create and append a bespoke customer segmentation system to their database led to response uplifts of up to 2.5 times, a 19% reduction in campaign costs and a 5% increase in market share.
The remaining runners up were joint entries from Occam DM and retailer Foot Shop, Callcredit Marketing Solutions and financial service provider Wesleyan, Occam DM and automotive manufacturer Kia Motors UK and a direct entry from the Macmillan Cancer Support charity.
Robin Beech, Foot Shop (left) Jon Cornes, Wesleyan (left)
Alan McCulloch, Callcredit (middle)
John Bache, Kia Motors UK (left) Gehan Heenkende, Macmillan (left)
Emma Hogan, Occam DM (middle)
James Alty, Managing Director at Apteco comments: “The aim of this new award is to recognise and celebrate the effective use of FastStats to drive marketing activities and to reward those who have delivered measurable benefits to their organisation, or client, as a result. We were truly impressed by the standard of entries received and spent a long time deliberating over the final decision. The scale and scope of the Planning-inc project for Argos showed outstanding skill and creativity under extremely tight timescales and the final decision by the judges was unanimous.”
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