Environics Analytics Launches New Micromarketing Tool
On January 29, Environics Analytics (EA) will launch ENVISION, a web-based micromarketing tool that provides business intelligence on customers and markets anywhere in Canada. Designed to use both customer data and a variety of marketing databases, ENVISION features a suite of “one-click business applications” for customer insights, site analysis and media planning.
The release of ENVISION comes at a time when businesses and not-for-profits are struggling with challenges brought on by the global economic downturn. A recent Business Week survey of executives found that more than half believe that sophisticated analytics are critical to ensuring that their marketing dollars are well spent. Recognizing these needs, Environics Analytics has created an advanced but easy-to-use analytics tool to help marketers better reach their customers and prospects.
“This is the time for marketers to be smarter about how they spend their money,” says Jan Kestle, president of Environics Analytics. “Our ENVISION tool can help users efficiently find their best customers, whether the targeting is based on their lifestage, their assets, what language they speak at home or their views towards green products.”
At the heart of the new micromarketing tool is SRC’s Alteryx geographic business intelligence platform that produces fast and flexible analysis through rapid calculations, formulas and methodologies. With its simple point-and-click interface, ENVISION allows users to create custom maps, customer profiles and executive summary reports along with rankings for markets, behaviours and product consumption. Companies and not-for-profits can classify their best customers, find the most promising prospects and develop marketing campaigns at the national, regional and local levels.
ENVISION also draws on Canada’s most comprehensive set of demographic, marketing and media databases, offering EA’s newly updated segmentation system, PRIZM C2, just released Social Values from Environics Research and EA’s 2009 Demographic Estimates and Projections (DEP) database. It brings together key Canadian media and marketing databases through PRIZM C2 links to data from Statistics Canada*, PMB, BBM Canada, infoCanada, Polk, NADBank, TeleAtlas and Canadian Financial Monitor. ENVISION was developed specifically for the Canadian marketplace by veteran research analysts, modelling statisticians and marketing professionals.
“ENVISION leverages our years of experience in the field, including the lessons we learned regarding which variables Canadians want in a demographic report and how to choose the target clusters from a customer profile,” says developer Gary Wood, Vice President of Software Development for Environics Analytics. “The result is a powerful online platform that’s fast, affordable and easy to use. Everybody’s got a Web browser so there’s nothing to install. The average entry-level marketing analyst could learn how to use the system and be productive in about 15 minutes.” But ENVISION also addresses the needs of the company CEO: One of the unique features is that it produces an automated, 20-page high-level summary report that combines insightful text, maps and graphics as well as more traditional tables and charts.
ENVISION represents a significant improvement over traditional micromarketing systems, which are often complex and require highly trained technicians to operate. ENVISION was designed especially for marketers who want to quickly create maps and reports that help them understand the impact of specific variables such as daytime population, disposable income and distance travelled. Wood, a veteran developer of micromarketing software systems, saw a need for a web-based tool that, with a few clicks of the mouse, could produce multiple marketing reports and maps about a client’s customers and trade areas—and then archive them for later use.
“With typical desktop systems, you run a report, print it out and then it disappears,” says Wood. “But ENVISION archives the output so it’s always available—like the old mainframe computers. You can run eight reports, three maps and an executive summary, and then come back later to find them waiting for you. ENVISION can geocode thousands of records over the Internet in minutes.”
According to Jan Kestle, the new product represents an advance in information accessibility and application. “With ENVISION, we can customize both the data components and the functionality by industry, even for each client, helping our customers be more productive at a lower cost,” Kestle continues. “This is what businesses need in the best of times and even more so in our current economy. And this new software captures analytical methods that we’ve developed over decades from working with hundreds of customers in dozens of industries. So it’s exciting for us to put our expertise at our clients’ fingertips.”