Direct marketing for multichannel retailers: Issues, challenges and solutions

Abstract

This paper discusses some key challenges retailers face as they try to build customer relationships and motivate customers to shop more frequently at their `real' and on-line stores and through their catalogues. With many retailers offering multiple avenues and formats for shopping, the challenges and complexity of making marketing investment decisions increases significantly. Besides the challenge of operating call centres and websites 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the entire systems and decision-making infrastructure increases substantially in a multichannel environment. Specifically, this paper discusses: — the types of information companies need to collect to facilitate one-to-one marketing investments — the `incremental' marketing performance metrics they should track — how marketing programmes may be designed by identifying `late' customers and the types of products recent website visitors are most interested in — a new modelling approach to predicting incremental customer performance and how marketing investments may be optimised through decision rules.Journal of Database Marketing (2002) 9, 259-266; doi:10.1057/palgrave.jdm.3240007