Customer lifecycle analytics from leading vendor KXEN are helping improve magazine circulation and maintain database marketing revenues at multi-media giant, Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP).

Since deploying KXEN’s software, Meredith is getting a significant direct financial benefit, is seeing performance improvements and better than 30% time savings in analytics, and has cut what was a 20-hour implementation process down to just two hours.

“We’d previously been doing our own analytic programming but with KXEN we’re doing more models, in less time and getting better results,” says Meredith’s director of business intelligence, Kelly Tagtow. “KXEN allows us to run our analytics directly in the database which is much faster, more efficient and there are fewer errors. Those are the big wins for us in email marketing.

“If KXEN had performed at least as well as before but with a 30% time saving, that would have been fine but in reality we got even better than that.”

With the largest database of any U.S. media company, Meredith routinely scores more than 16 million records every week. Without the performance and efficiency benefits enabled by KXEN’s software, Tagtow believes the task would have been more difficult.

“Accurate analysis of customer data is critical to generating circulation revenue and maintaining database marketing revenue in these challenging economic times,” he says. “Because of KXEN’s unique combination of analytic sophistication, ease of use, and integration into our technology infrastructure, every product manager benefits by improving circulation and database marketing efficiency.”

Deploying KXEN’s software has also enabled Meredith to react more quickly to changing business conditions. The results of the KXEN analyses drive direct mail and email campaigns - channels both vital to attracting new subscribers. The improved productivity and scope of KXEN means Meredith is now able to promote more titles, more regularly, with campaigns that are better targeted and better informed.

Analytics are also behind the list marketing side of Meredith’s business, which is also built around its extensive database. “Tools like KXEN are key to realising the true value of all that data and are very important to what is a major part of our business,” adds Tagtow.

“Meredith is a text book example of the way KXEN’s software can add real value to a large corporation’s business processes through greater efficiency and ease of use,” says KXEN CEO John Ball. “The financial and business benefits they have already seen represent a tremendous return on investment, with potentially much more still to come in the future.”