Identifying the best customers: Descriptive, predictive and look-alike profiling

Abstract

Direct marketers typically attempt to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns by targeting their best customers. In the author's experience, many direct marketers are unaware that typical target methods develop a descriptive profile of their target customer — an approach that often results in less than successful campaigns. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the inadequacy of the descriptive approach and to demonstrate the benefits of the correct predictive profiling approach. The predictive profiling approach is explained, and then the approach to look-alike profiling is expanded.