Business and Marketing

New solutions include next logical product and customer lookalike modeling. The long-time direct marketing player announces it will open a San Jose office in September.

Merit puts its eye on the buy.

Merit Direct has introduced a suite of new lead scoring and revenue producing solutions for B2B marketers that combine its OmniChannelBASE customer files with the analytical expertise of its Strategic Services Group.

The company is billing the three new offerings as next-generation predictive marketing tools for its increasingly technology-driven client base. “This is not just ad hoc modeling, where a client's existing customer file is matched to a database,” says Dee Blohm, Merit's VP of customer acquisition and retention. “We've found the only reliable predictive element is a transaction.”

Merit's new predictive analytics suite includes the following modeling programs:

Next Logical Product: Compares transaction histories against customer attributes in OmniChannelBASE to determine the next product a business buyer is likely to purchase.

Customer Lookalike: Determines the fundamental attributes of a client's highest-value customers and applies those variables to identify prospects with similar characteristics among the 55 million business contacts in the database. It also identifies contact preferences among direct mail, email, and phone.

Alpha Models: A top-of-the-funnel solution that seeks to cull the small percentage of new business prospects that will spend 10 to 20 times more than the average buyer throughout their customer lifecycles. Blohm uses the example of an enterprise on the scale of Docusign, which captures 40,000 leads a day, looking to place its resources against leads with the best possible returns. “You can get a weekly feed of those leads and handle them differently,” she says.

“We've been doing modeling and analytics for 15 years, and it's based on real, live buying behavior at a site and customer contact level,” Blohm adds. “Our growing roster of tech clients has been hungry for this, and so we've introduced these products to help optimize results.”

As further evidence of its devotion to the tech community, MeritDirect announced it will open a San Jose office in September.

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