John Wanamaker famously said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Most companies collect enormous amounts of data about their customers but few use this data effectively to improve their marketing efforts.  Data about the results of marketing campaigns is often not turned into actionable reports and even then it often does not make it to an audience that can utilize the information.  Luckily it is easier today to discover which half of your budget is being wasted.

Tools to analyze data and create interactive reports for distribution to wide audience have made it possible to make sense of the piles of data collected by companies.  Until recently these tools were out of the price range of all but the largest users.  Now with the advent of software as a service (SaaS) these powerful tools can fit into even the smallest budget.

Altair has partnered with one of the leading BI reporting tool providers to add online analytics and reporting to our suite of marketing services.  Sonar provides the best information at the correct level, from the executive to the analyst. We have a proven track record of rolling out analytical dashboards that allow users to easily drill into the data and find where their marketing dollars are being misspent and how to place marketing budget effectively.

With Wells Fargo and Bank of America pulling out of the reverse mortgage business there is opportunity for smaller players to gain market share. This gain can help in two ways. First, the Reverse Mortgage/HECM market is likely to consolidate further. If you have a great marketing engine for market share gain, this could pay off. Second, is the natural growth of your existing business or the extension of your business into a new product line.

Even though overall endorsements are down, many of the remaining lenders are seeing increased business as they compete for the customers no longer being picked up by the former market leaders. Two things are happening: lenders who formerly only marketed to current clients or affinity prospects are growing their business by moving into the pure prospecting realm, as well as new lenders entering the fray. In either case, to hit the ground running, prospecting is now an even more important component for Reverse Mortgage lenders.

In order to help take advantage of this opportunity, Altair has updated its reverse mortgage model that helps target households likely to respond to an offer for a reverse mortgage. This model was rebuilt using homeowners that opened up new reverse mortgage accounts between January and August of 2011 in order to reflect the most current market conditions. At our standard score cut, the model can more than double the response rate for offers mailed. For more information about this, and other mortgage models from Altair, please contact:

There are many types of predictive models used in direct marketing: response models, clone models, cross sell models, revenue models, and many others.  What these models all have in common is that they require a great deal of data in order to build a model that works well.  But it doesn’t matter how much data you have if that data is not good quality data. 

At Altair we build all of our models using our exclusive multi-source consumer data that is built from over 20 sources.  First, we only use records that have been delivery point verified (DPV) insuring the address is the highest quality.  The model would be worthless unless you can contact the consumer.  The data is validated, meaning that we look at what has been provided and make sure it is in the acceptable range of values for that data element.  The data is also verified.  We do this by comparing several incoming sources to each other and if both elements are the same or within acceptable tolerances we know what is being provided can be trusted.  The result is a data file for modeling that has highly deliverable consumers with the broadest array and deepest coverage of data.  The result is we are able to fill in many of the missing values that are the bane of any modeling project.  And the values that are populated on Altair’s files are going to be the cleanest and freshest values available. 

All of this clean and accurate data helps to create models that are more predictive, more stable and give you better results.  Altair’s proprietary multi-source data is one of the reasons that our shelf models and custom models work so well for so many of our customers.  This data is also available for your modeling projects so that you can build the best possible marketing models.

Sure, of course you know exactly who your customers are.  You have their names and addresses.  You even know their transaction history with you.  You may even know some things like age and income if they have submitted that kind of information on forms.   But does this mean you really know who they are and who they are not?

At Altair we have been helping companies learn more about their customers by creating customer profiles that show distributions of 20+ attributes for your customers.  And more importantly, in order to add context, these distributions are compared against national consumer distributions along with index values so that you can see exactly what sets your customers apart from the herd.

Do you measure the success of your direct marketing with just the response rate? If so, you may not be getting a good measure of success. Especially for financial products, responders often fail to convert into buyers. This can be problematic if you are selecting prospects to mail by using only a response model. A strong likelihood to respond often means financial issues that mean a low likelihood of being approved as low credit-quality consumers seek additional credit.

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