Case Study: Southern States Cooperative achieves higher direct mail response rates and increased gross margins with Alteryx

Southern States Cooperative Uses Alteryx to Improve Direct Mail Response Rates and Gross Margins

Southern States Cooperative is a large, farmer‑owned retail cooperative (more than 300,000 members and 1,200+ locations) that needed to improve the effectiveness and ROI of its high‑value direct mail programs. The company lacked a consolidated way to access customer and marketing data and relied on basic tools like Excel, which made targeting slow, imprecise, and costly.

In 2011 Southern States implemented Alteryx to bring together data, apply spatial and predictive analytics, and run end‑to‑end workflows for extraction, cleansing, modeling, and scoring. The result: time‑to‑insight fell from weeks to hours, mailing volumes were cut by 63% while response rates rose 34%, and incremental gross margin improved (about $193,600 from the 2010 catalog and $206,812 including 2011), with analytics now used across the business.

Southern States Cooperative

Greg Bucko

Manager of Customer Insights