Intelligent Enterprise

SPSS has introduced predictive analytics software that helps marketers analyze customer and market data to boost purchases, improve responses to offers and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

PASW-Direct Marketing, launched last week, is designed for business users and requires no knowledge of advanced statistics, according toSPSS, which IBM agreed in July to acquire. A key component of the software's ease-of-use feature is an intuitive interface for performing sophisticated analysis.

The interface enables marketers to perform six analytical procedures, including recency, frequency and monetary analysis; cluster analysis, and prospect profiling. In addition, marketers can improve the effectiveness of campaigns through postal code analysis, propensity scoring and control package testing.

SPSS claims the new product can help organization get the most out of their marketing dollars by finding the customers and prospects mostly likely to respond to campaigns. For example, the "propensity to purchase" function in the software leverages previous response information and customer characteristics in ranking which customers and prospects are likely to respond to an offer. This reduces cost by keeping people least likely to respond off of mailing lists.

"Knowing specifically which customers to target " and more importantly, who not to target -- reduces marketing waste and quickly adds ROI and value, so marketing is no longer viewed as a business expense," Jason Verlen, chief product strategist for SPSS, said in a statement.

The need among corporations for better statistical analysis was covered in a recent article in The New York Times. The rising demand is due to an explosion in digital data, which is expected to increase 500% by 2012.

PASW Direct Marketing is the latest addition to SPSS' PASW Statistics 18 modules, which are available for Windows, Linux and Mac platforms on the desktop; and Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX and HP/UX on the server. Pricing for PASW Direct Marketing, and other PASW Statistics 18 modules, is available on the SPSS Web store.