Online & Offline Strategies and Database Recommendations for SAS Canada Community

Copyright © 2008, SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

Enhance Engagement of SAS Canada Community

Created by GBC Team


Agenda Executive Summary

Current Situation

Objective, Strategies and Tactics

Conclusions

Appendices


Executive Summary

• This report offers some recommendations for encouraging more SAS users to participate more often in SAS events.

• Analysis is shown in Appendices. This plan focuses more on some strategies that SAS can begin executing today as well as a recommendation on the data that should be collected in the future and how to leverage it once the new database becomes available.


Executive Summary (continued)

Specifically, we recommend:

• Increasing number of event types with high attendance rate

• Modifying event types with low attendance rate

• Improving relevant data to better understand the relationship between attendee profiles and event attributes for better targeting and communication

• Reducing user effort required for on line registration

• Encouraging external social communities to migrate to the SAS community

• Making it easier for users to connect with groups/networks with shared interest

• Testing alternative communication techniques to improve attendance


Current Situation

SAS Canada believes that greater involvement amongst users generates higher opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell their products and services.

SAS Canada Community provides online and offline platforms for the users of SAS products to interact with each other and share their knowledge.

The database shows that a relatively small number of users (986 out of 5470 total users) have been taking advantage of SAS Canada Community’s offerings (1540 attended counts since 2010).

We built marketing strategies with the goal to increase the attended counts effectively and efficiently.


Issue/Opportunity Implication

• Insufficient or unavailable data which limits optimal understanding of SAS users

• Better customer understanding makes it easier to engage customers with matters that are most relevant to them.

• Most popular events (e.g. SAS User Group) have low attendance rates. Events with high attendance rates are less popular

• Need to understand the event attributes and communication approaches that impact popularity and attendance rates

• Limited connection between SAS online community and external groups/networks such as forums (e.g. Talk Stats*)

• SAS can strengthen the appeal of its online community by convincing external groups to migrate to the SAS community

*www.talkstats.com*www.talkstats.com/forumdisplay.php/16-SAS



Objective 1: Attendance

Increase total attendance counts by 10%


Strategy 1Create additional events by identifying and building on the formula used for event types that have high attendance rate* Course, External Event, SAS Talks, SAS Live Event, On-Demand SAS Webcast, Relationship Marketing/Corporate Hospitality, SAS Webinar, Contact Request (See Appendix for analysis)

Tactics

1. Identify event elements (topic, venue, speaker, location, month of the year, etc.) that contributed to high attendance rate and create additional events

Example: Analyze how distance to event, commute time, cost of transportation, month of the year and industry affect participation

2. Identify profile of attendees (industry, province, frequency of attendance, month of the year) at events with high attendance rate

3. For profiles with low attendance, create relevant events based on event elements identified in #1

4. For profiles with high attendance, assess opportunity to offer them more frequently or on a regional basis.

*Attendance rate defined as attendance counts divided by total including attended users and non-attended users


Strategy 2

Test other communication channels , creative approaches, and targeting techniques to improve attendance for popular* events with low % participation (See Appendix for analysis)

Tactics1.Target decision makers with more intrusive direct marketing techniques such as direct mail and phone

2.Target and tailor promotional messages according to user profile and interests (when new database is available,)

3.Test the impact of creating a micro-site and promoting on social media (e.g. – SAS Community, etc) and SAS home page

*Popularity defined as absolute number of attendees


Objective 2: Database

Enhance data capture and data quality to better target and tailor communication and services


Information/Fields to be Captured

User • Industry • Pre-defined and required Job Function Category • City of user location (not company headquarter)• Pre-defined Area of Interest• Status for a particular event (see note below)

Event • Online or Offline (2 categories)• City where an offline event occurs • Event type• Month of the year when the event occurs

Note For offline events Attended Registered Declined No Response

For online events Downloaded Registered Declined No Response


Tactics

Facilitate online registration by creating pre-populated registration form for events that only require that user update any personal information that has changed

Target promotion of events according to user profile Example:

- Segment users by industry and target financial service and telecommunication industries

- Segment users by job function; test and target promotion according to job functions

- Analyze association between user profile and event profile



Objective 3: Virtual PlatformIncrease usage of SAS Canada online Community

Strategy: Minimize registration and search effort

Tactics: Automatically enroll SAS users once they register for a product on the server Retrieve personal usage preferences by sharing personal email Create micro-site containing all events for users to search by event type, location, date, industry and solution; users may register immediately

Strategy: Promote community discussions of greatest interest

Tactics: Profile links to popular discussion on SAS home page Develop weekly emails highlighting the latest blogs, articles and news

Strategy: Encourage owners of most popular discussion communities outside SAS Community to join the SAS community

Tactics: Building relationships with online forums by reaching out and starting to participate in their discussions Offer to maintain discussion forum “brand name” and to promote on SAS site


Conclusions Lots of opportunity to increase attendance and user involvement by

• Leveraging the “formula of high % attendance events to create other events

• Finding more effective ways of promoting events with low % participation but a relatively high number of attendees

Improved data capture and data quality will enhance SAS’ ability to target and tailor communication as well as support continuous improvement efforts to strengthen the appeal of SAS events

Exploration of other forms of promoting events can help identify better ways of breaking through cluttered email in-baskets of users. Vehicles like direct mail, if used creatively, can influence key decision makes to support event attendance by staff.

Appendices


SWOT Analysis Opportunities High quality of crucial SAS events increase

users’ interests and improve attendance rate Comprehensive and accurate data deepens

understanding of users and improves customization

Systematic process creates better user experience

Relationships with other groups and networks provide users with easy and quicker access to information

Better technology improves the process of communication

Network and knowledge sharing platforms accommodate increasing needs for business analytics

Threats Clear presentation of upcoming events on

SAP website, making it easy for users to search

Large SAP User Group with 130,000 members

Easy and quicker registration process of SPSS and Cognos

External LinkedIn groups and SAS networks not communicating with SAS Canada Community

Strength Strong representation of financial industry in the

community Comprehensive online community network Active participation in Social Media

Communities, such as LinkedIn groups. Strong loyalty and close relationship.

Weakness Low attendance rate of some crusual SAS

events such as SAS User Group Low number of members in online network

owned by SAS Canada Community Lack of organization and management of

different groups and networks related to SAS Canada




Data Received

Current Status: attended, registered, invited, no response, no show, cancelled, declined wait listed, no status


Data Cleansing The processes of cleansing and modeling included:

− Removal of duplicates

− Correcting Start Date and End Dates that were in the wrong position, sometimes the start date was after the end date

− Correcting of date cells that were not in the appropriate date format

− Filtering 26 most important events

− Merge of tables in one master table to optimize the analysis process


Table Reconstruction• Exclude high-level decision makers (job functions of C-level, directors,

VP) and non-users

• Include only users of relevant and unknown job functions (administrative, consultant, educator, manager, medical, sales, student and technical)

• Current_Status (9 categories, assuming mutually exclusive) in Event_Contacts table is further categorized into

Attended, Not Attended, Other, where:

Attended attended

Not Attended registered, invited, no response, no show, cancelled, declined

Other wait listed, no status (majority)


Event Types with High % No Status – Removed for Attendance Rate Analyses

% No Status = No Status / Total


Assessing Popularity and % Attendance

Table goes here

Total = Attended + Not AttendedAttendance Rate = Attended / TotalOther: Waitlisted, No Status (majority)Attended + Not Attended + Other = Number of Contacts


Largest Industries: Financial Service & Telecommunication


Largest Financial Industry Segment: Commercial Banks


Largest Telecommunication Segments: Network Equipment and Telco Service


Different Geographical Distribution for Financial and Telecom Industries

Telecommunication : British ColumbiaFinancial Service: Nova Scotia

Telecommunication Financial Service


Energy Industry: Alberta and New Brunswick


Manufacturing Industry: Quebec


Public Sector Industry: Quebec & Ontario


Retail Industry: Ontario, Saskatchewan, Quebec


Services Industry: Ontario, Quebec, Alberta


Large Amount of Unknown Job Function Data

Job Function Count of CONTACT_ID Percentage

Administrative 18 0.21%

Consultant 127 1.45%

Educator/Professor 5 0.06%

Manager 1140 13.01%

Medical/Healthcare 24 0.27%

Sales 9 0.10%

Student 5 0.06%

Technical 1030 11.75%

Unknown 6407 73.10%

Total 8765 100.00%


Predicting Attended Counts by Number of Contacts

With nearly 4500 contacts, less than 600 attend


12.8% Attendance Rate for All (22) Target Event Types


Predicting Attended Counts of Event Types with High Attendance Rate

Among more than 300 users, more than 60 attended


Achieve 20 % Attendance Rate Using Selected (8) Event Types with High Attendance Rate

Business

Online & Offline Strategies and Database Recommendations for SAS Canada Community