Confused.com chooses SAS to better target new customers and improve customer retention

LONDON – Confused.com, a leading UK price comparison site, has selected SAS®, the leader in business analytics software and services, to support continued growth through better understanding and segmenting of its millions of customer contacts. Using SAS Analytics, Confused.com will improve customer insight and make more targeted and relevant contact with them, thereby increasing the number of new customers and improving customer retention. The company will be able to open up additional marketing channels, optimise marketing campaigns and work towards providing online product referrals.

Using SAS, Confused.com will be able look at which customers buy what, why they buy it and when. They’ll be able to identify the best customers to target with offerings like home insurance, utility services and financial services products.

Increased competition amongst other aggregator and price comparison websites, alongside higher TV advertising costs, has driven this change. Moreover, the recession has meant that consumers want to shop around even more, further increasing traffic to Confused.com’s website. This increased traffic has created the opportunity to become far smarter in targeting, to improve customer uptake and response rates.

Tom Beverley, Customer Director at Confused.com, says: “Our main requirements from SAS are to reduce our cost of offer, bring down marketing costs, improve cross-sales with other products on the site, and increase retention. We want to improve the level of customer insight and are developing a lot of personal finance products that require better one-to-one targeting.” He goes onto say: “Prior to SAS, customer insight was limited to information gathered via car insurance quotes, with no segmentation apart from very simple demographics like age and TV region.”

Confused.com considered several options, including SPSS, before choosing SAS for its proven analytics. The company recognised that SAS’ versatile software lets users access data from anywhere and transform it into usable insights. SAS was specifically chosen for its ability to bring disparate data sources together, manage large data volumes and carry out modelling and segmentation. “I’d worked with SAS before and was sure it provided what we needed,” says Beverley.

“Initially, the company will focus on customer segmentations. Results from analyses can be used, for example, to locate variables, enhance selections and improve targeting in email campaigns. Beverley provides an example: ”In our home insurance campaign, we will use SAS to highlight the customers who will find the product most relevant, and use this to maximise response and optimise campaign size. SAS gives us a far better idea of who we should pursue; using SAS we will target fewer people and achieve more uplift"

Confused.com believes that SAS will significantly impact business by improving customer retention and campaign relevance. Furthermore, it sees future uses for SAS’ analytics, such as to improve onsite processes and inform new product development.

Ian Manocha, Managing Director of SAS UK and Ireland states: “The current economy has made customers much more savvy about finding the best deals for insurance and financial products. The introduction of more aggregators means that the market is changing whilst competition increases. SAS’ software will provide Confused.com with a more analytical approach to marketing activities ensuring it remains the most widely recognised aggregator in the UK.”
About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know® .