About Marketing Optimization

Marketing optimization enables you to determine the optimal set of customers to target in a marketing campaign, and the optimal communications to use for each customer. Marketing optimization can accommodate various types of constraints that commonly restrict direct marketing campaigns, such as budgetary and cell size restrictions, communication channel capacities, contact policy restrictions, and other types of business rules. You can also select the objective to be optimized. For example, you might want to maximize the expected revenue or profit, minimize the expected cost of the campaign, or maximize the total number of expected responses. You can also control certain aspects of the underlying mathematical algorithms that solve the marketing optimization problem.

In marketing optimization, a set of one or more campaigns is designed to target a list of customers or prospects. Campaigns can differ from one another in terms of the product that they promote, the goal or target that they are designed to achieve, or the person who manages the campaign. Each campaign is identified by a unique campaign code. Furthermore, each campaign consists of one or more communications, and a communication code uniquely identifies each communication within a campaign. Each communication belongs to exactly one campaign.

Beginning with a customer list and the master list of communications, marketing optimization addresses a fundamental design problem: determining for each possible customer-communication pair whether the specific customer should be targeted with the specific communication. The optimization uses a quantitative valuation of each potential customer-communication assignment, which is a numerical estimate of the value of such an assignment to the direct marketing organization.