Financial Planning Company Embraces Automated Predictive Modeling for up to 40% Boost
on Direct Mail Response

Success formula includes CopperKey’s
BizFusion™ Prospector software

GILBERT, AZ, 28 November 2006 –With investors becoming more resistant to financial planning ads, investment advisory firms are searching for ways to gain an edge over their competitors. It’s the constant search for this edge that led Josh Mellberg, President of Senior Advisors Wealth Management of Tucson, AZ to another Arizona-based company in the “predictive marketing” software field called CopperKey, based in Gilbert.

At 26, Mellberg, a certified Senior Advisor and a Registered Investment Advisor, has been a member of the Million Dollar Round Table for two of the three years he has been in business. The association recognizes the success of the top three percent of U.S. financial advisors.

Mellberg’s company is geared to delivering the financial planning edge for people in the near-retirement, 50-plus age bracket. “I work with a team of four advisors and three staff, and our company focuses on estate planning, reducing or eliminating taxes, and conservative investments offering higher return with less risk,” says Mellberg. “I also run a series of monthly educational seminars.”

The seminars, Mellberg’s primary business development tool, require his company to send out 45,000 mailers a month at an annual cost of $160,000 to attract new clients to his company’s services. In the search to reduce direct mail costs and maximize return on marketing investment, Mellberg discovered BizFusion Prospector, CopperKey’s Web-based automated predictive marketing software, a technology that analyzes hundreds of customer attributes to optimize current and prospect lists and predict market potential.
 
“Using BizFusion Prospector, I increased the response rate to my mailers from a range of 0.8 to 0.9 percent to 1.33% while using a less expensive 29 cent postcard format versus a fold-over mailer that used to cost me 50 cents,” says Mellberg. “So I’m getting a response rate that is 30 to 40 percent higher, and I’m saving 18.75% on marketing costs.”

BizFusion automation replaces human analysts trying to predict trends by manually performing predictive modeling on Excel spreadsheets or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database information for days or weeks.

Instead, with a simple point-and-click portal interface, BizFusion Prospector allows financial executives and managers to automatically analyze their customers, perform sophisticated market analysis and identify high quality prospects that are ranked by their level of interest and likelihood to become an investment client in minutes versus hours.  For example, a financial company can use BizFusion to predict and rank customers most likely to make new investments within the next three months and map those customers by region.

“What BizFusion Prospector does is nothing short of magic,” says Mellberg. “It’s not that it couldn’t be done before, but this type of predictive modeling software has typically been offered for a $50,000 upfront charge, plus a time-lag that still involved human analysts to use it. The inability to use the software yourself, plus the cost, placed this technology out of reach for all but the largest financial institutions.” Mellberg’s cost to run BizFusion Prospector – priced on an annual software-as-a-service subscription – against his customer list is easily manageable and affordable.

About CopperKey Inc.

CopperKey Inc. is a predictive marketing software and solutions company comprised of econometricians, software developers and industry people with an average tenure of 10 years or more in their respective fields. The executive team is made up of former Acxiom, American Express, AT&T, Compaq, Honeywell, Motorola and NASA leaders.

© 2007 CopperKey Inc. BizFusion is a trademark of CopperKey Inc. All other company and/or product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.