Targeting & Recommendations

9 important questions on Targeting & Recommendations

What is a house file (characteristics)?

  • Contains transactions and customer data
  • Already contains the "best" customers for the firm
  • Far more responsive than prospective list of customers

What determines the profitability of a mailing or recommendation?

  • Cost of contact
  • Revenue if customer buys
  • Opportunity cost
  • Response probability

How can we estimate the response probability and the expected revenue/margin?

Data driven marketing approach, based on house file.
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Three steps in the targeting process:

Step 1: Estimation sample (link customer data to purchase behavior, estimate on customer characteristics and choice behavior)
Step 2: Validation sample (score, sort and decide which customers to target, validate on customer characteristics and choice behavior)
Step 3: Test sample (score customers and send out mailing/offerings, based on customer characteristics but not on choice behavior)

Similar approach to recommending techniques:

  • Predict likelihood of purchase for each customer, and expected profits
  • Pick most profitable products to recommend

Commonality Index can be used for several data:

  • Behavioral data
  • Geographical location
  • Past purchases

Intuitive ways to determine how similar products are:

  • Analyse the description (or reviews) of each product and see similarties
  • Look at the ratings given to products
  • Look at classification fort the product (e.g. for movies/genre/actors)

Popular methods for recommendation engines:

  • Random forests
  • Logistic regression
  • Neural network

How do you obtain insights into causal links with recommendations?

Logistic regression

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

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