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We live in a connected digital world. Look around you. This week, I have received a text message from my motor vehicle repair centre confirming a date for a vehicle service, I recieved an email about my Starbucks card, advising of a special tasting at my local coffee shop, I browse the web with my laptop at hotspots and have the charge sent direct to my T-Mobile mobile phone bill and I receive live schedule information on Edinburgh City buses at bus stops. This all happened this week. And it's only set to increase.

What ties these services together? It's convergence. Finally after years of promises, converged media and devices is a real option for millions of us. Never before has so much information been packaged, integrated and presented across channels and devices, often in real time. Alerts, comfort messages, offers & promotions, advisories, etc.

What makes it relevant and manageable is the personalisation. The messages come in a form, at a time, in a location and with content that helps make my daily life a little easier. 12 minutes before the number 26 bus comes? OK, I'll go get my Grande Skinny Latte, rather than wait. When is that service scheduled? I'll just check my phone inbox.

What's really amazing is how 'normal' this starts to become. If we all stopped and thought about it we'd be shouting at each other - "Look how cool this is!!!!" but we go on with our day, "Yup, the plumber has just been to check the radiators and he recorded his time on a mobile device little larger than my phone and I signed the screen. Oh yes, this is just normal." Are you kidding me? How did we move from not being able to programme video recorders to having trades-people record their time on digital devices and automatically bill us?

Yup, it's a connected world. And if you think it's cool today, just wait and see what's round the corner.

"If it can be measured, it can be managed." ata about interests and activities. It is important to keep in mind the word: "meaningful". The context of your interaction with customers will define what is meaningful. The value in profiling is to help you present relevent information and offers to discrete customers and improve engagement, and thus profits. Read more about our profiling services.

Segmentation is an often misunderstood term in direct marketing. A simple (and common) use of the term, could be as a proxy for simply ranking customers on one dimension, say, annual sales and putting the top 10% in segment A, the next 10% in segment B and so on. This is a little simplistic and for SBS Direct, segmentation is all about clustering customers into dynamic associations, for example, for a magazine publisher, this could mean one segement would be customers who proactively renew their subscription before their renewal date and another segment could be customers who renew their subscription after receiving one reminder. Our clustering approach tends to yield improved results. Read more about our segmentation services.

Targeting is the whole point of direct marketing, to use precision rather than coverage as the approach to the marketplace. If we know which customers are most likely to purchase a text bundle on a mobile phone contract, then let's approach these customers rather than the ones who are least likely. This seems like common sense, and it is but it's also backed up with a whole lot of science. We can help you pinpoint your customer targeting to improve the return on investment of marketing campaigns. It might be said that it doesn't matter how good your creative, if it's directed at the wrong audience, it's just junk. Read more about our targeting services.

If life was certain, there would be no need for testing. However, life is filled with uncertainty and although you may be able to control your brand to some extent you cannot control the environment within which it exists. For this reason, direct marketing has evolved a package of testing methods to improve the likelihood of successful campaigns. We can help to setup and manage appropriate tests to give the highest confidence of success for the minimum investment in time and expense. Read more about our testing methodology.

Want to improve your marketing effectiveness? A propensity model could be the right tool for you. It is in effect a ranked prospect model, where the spectrum of customers or prospects (either all or a segment) are ordered on one or more dimensions of significant date. This means generating a list of prospects who are likely to be most likely to accept a particular offer. As a for instance, imagine, as a mobile phone company, being able to send details of an upgrade offer only to those customers who are likely to be interested in it? No overspill, very efficient, profitable. This is what propensity models can do with more accuracy than other techniques but they have to be carefully designed. Read more about how we help clients to build such models.