If business is starting off below the marketing plan, with the new system, Sears can readjust and re-allocate marketing expense to try to deal with it. Customers can be compared not just by RFM segment, but also by media. By tracking sales in the past, Sears knows that their half life is 20 days after a catalog is mailed. They can track the entire success of a book by sales made during the first 20 days. Customer activity is now going up, not down as it did for the last decade Sears found that sales parallel customer activity.
Sales are up also.
Every single media but one, after the database kicked in, is up. Sears reactivated 12,000 customers, and made a profit while doing it. Future Goals Integration of data . The goal now is to integrate the customer information and understanding of their behavior by putting this data on the screens at the telemarketing call centers so that Sears can start target marketing program scripts right at the beginning of calls. They also want to put this information onto the screens of the 1,800 catalog agents who talk to the people when they pick up their packages.