Bauer Media Group steers subscription marketing with DeltaMaster

Bauer Media Group has used DeltaMaster for years in a variety of anal­y­sis, planning, and reporting projects. The company primarily uses the software to drive the success of its subscription marketing.

Bauer Media Group is one of Europe’s leading media companies and pub­lishes over 60 magazines in Germany alone. In the 2013 fiscal year, the company generated 2.3 billion euros in revenues with a workforce of 11,000 people. The company founded in 1875 is owned and managed by the Bauer family in the fifth generation.

To gain control over its ever-growing volumes of data, Bauer saw the need to extend its existing systems with a modern Business Intelligence system. The company chose Microsoft SQL Server as a data warehouse and Delta­Master as a front-end system. “With this software solution, we can analyze the entire subscription marketing in our company,” explains Ralf Vollert, Director Sales Control at Bauer Vertriebs KG. Users can closely examine data generated by selling magazines through BMD, a national organization of media and service retailers.

They also use DeltaMaster to monitor cancellation periods and detect errors in cal­cu­la­ting advertising subsidies. By reviewing new and cancelled magazine sub­scrip­tions, users can also analyze and monitor the invoices for advertising subsidies.

As soon as Bauer had the sales data from BMD under control, it embarked on further projects. One of these was analyzing can­cel­la­tion rates. The company loses ap­prox­imate­ly 20% of subscribers each year due to can­cel­lat­ions or failure to pay. Yet it wins new subscribers as well. To determine if structural effects in winning new customers influence the changes in the cancellation rate, Bauer conducts several in-depth multiyear analyses in DeltaMaster. The company also examines changes in longstanding cus­tomers. It categorizes the subscribers into age groups and compares the cancellation rates with each other in recent years.

Using modern Business Intelligence, Bauer has boosted the efficiency of winning new customers. Each year, for example, the company invests an eight-digit sum to acquire new customers. The win process, therefore, needs to be carefully planned and executed.

Bauer advertises for subscriptions through a variety of channels, including phone calls, personal referrals, and internet ads. The controllers, who plan and monitor the costs involved, pay particular attention to the cost per order (CPO), which shows the price of winning a new subscriber. Previ­ously, they had to plan and analyze the costs of each advertising channel separately and comparisons among the different channels were not feasible.

The comparable evaluations in DeltaMaster resolved this issue. “The data is now stored in a database instead of individual Excel files – which is a major advantage for comparative analysis,” adds Ralf Vollert. To plan the costs for the following year, users can now easily enter the necessary values through the familiar DeltaMaster interface. Helpful options support users along the way. “We frequently plan a variety of scenarios and the simple ‘copy’ function has minimized the time we need to input the data,” he continues.

The controllers took an even closer look at the cost per order as part of a workshop with Bissantz. They can now identify new patterns using special data mining methods. The pivot navigation method in DeltaMaster, for example, reveals which type of ad­ver­tis­ing drives changes in the can­cel­la­tion rate. As the users drill down on the pivot table and expand additional columns or rows step by step, they get closer to finding the answers to their current questions. DeltaMaster itself determines which dimension offers the most important insights and auto­mat­i­cally displays it as the next step.

Following the workshop, the controllers also optimized the overall report design and introduced standards for creating reports.These standards simplified the way to present complex topics and help report consumers understand the content better. By adding context-related links or ex­ten­ding pivot tables with sparklines and filled bars, they have also increased the information density of their reports. The par­tic­ipants agree that the work­shop was a complete success and plan to host another one in the future.

• Marketing controls
• Analysis of cancellation periods and rates, cost per order and complaints
• Ability to compare advertising costs
• In-depth analysis with the pivot navigation
• Data-dense cockpits using sparklines and filled bars

• one of Europe´s leading media companies
• Puplishes more than 60 journals in Germany
• Generated sales of over € 2.3 billion and employed around 11,000 people in 2013
• Since its foundation in 1875, the Bauer family has been managing the company for the fifth generation