This study provides a formal analysis of the customer targeting problem when the cost for a marketing action depends on the customer response and proposes a framework to estimate the decision variables for campaign profit optimization. Targeting a customer is profitable if the impact and associated profit of the marketing treatment are higher than its cost. Despite the growing literature on uplift models to identify the strongest treatment-responders, no research has investigated optimal targeting when the costs of the treatment are unknown at the time of the targeting decision. Stochastic costs are ubiquitous in direct marketing and customer retention campaigns because marketing incentives are conditioned on a positive customer response. This study makes two contributions to the literature, which are evaluated on an e-commerce coupon targeting campaign. First, we formally analyze the targeting decision problem under response-dependent costs. Profit-optimal targeting requires an estimate of the treatment effect on the customer and an estimate of the customer response probability under treatment. The empirical results demonstrate that the consideration of treatment cost substantially increases campaign profit when used for customer targeting in combination with an estimate of the average or customer-level treatment effect. Second, we propose a framework to jointly estimate the treatment effect and the response probability by combining methods for causal inference with a hurdle mixture model. The proposed causal hurdle model achieves competitive campaign profit while streamlining model building. Code is available at https://github.com/Humboldt-WI/response-dependent-costs.
翻译:这份研究报告对市场营销行动费用取决于客户的反应时客户针对的问题进行了正式分析,并提出了一个估算决定变量的框架,以优化竞选利润; 如果市场营销待遇的影响和相关利润高于成本,以客户为目标是有利可图的; 尽管关于提升模式的文献越来越多,以确定最有力的治疗响应者,但没有一项研究调查在选择目标决定作出时治疗费用未知时的最佳目标; 直接营销和客户保留运动中,由于营销奖励以客户的积极反应为条件,因此,直接营销和市场保留活动的成本无处不在; 本研究报告对文献作出了两项贡献,对电子商业优惠票选择活动进行了评价; 首先,我们正式分析了取决于响应成本的针对性决定问题; 利润最佳选择要求对客户的治疗影响作出估计,对治疗的概率作出估计; 经验结果显示,如果将治疗成本考虑在内,在客户选择目标时,与对平均或客户一级治疗效果的估计相结合,则会大大增加运动的利润; 第二,我们提议建立一个框架,共同估算待遇效果和基于响应成本的电子商务优惠性优惠性,同时将风险与目前的风险性标准合并起来。