IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orinte/v31y2001i1p77-90.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimizing Customer Mail Streams at Fingerhut

Author

Listed:
  • Deb Campbell

    (Fingerhut Companies, Inc. 4400 Baker Road, Minnetonka, Minnesota 55343)

  • Randy Erdahl

    (Fingerhut Companies, Inc.)

  • Doug Johnson

    (Fingerhut Companies, Inc.)

  • Eric Bibelnieks

    (IBM Global Services, 650 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402)

  • Michael Haydock

    (IBM Global Services)

  • Mark Bullock

    (Level (3) Communications 1035 El Dorado Blvd., Broomfield, Colorado 80021)

  • Harlan Crowder

    (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304)

Abstract

Fingerhut mails up to 120 catalogs per year to each of its 7 million customers. With this dense mail plan and mailing decisions made independently for each catalog, many customers were receiving redundant and unproductive catalogs. To identify and eliminate this excessive operational expense, IBM and Fingerhut together developed an optimization system that selects the most profitable sequence of catalogs, called a mail stream, for each customer. With mail streams, Fingerhut makes better mailing decisions at the customer level, resulting in increased profits. Today, Fingerhut runs this application weekly to find the most profitable mail stream for each customer.

Suggested Citation

  • Deb Campbell & Randy Erdahl & Doug Johnson & Eric Bibelnieks & Michael Haydock & Mark Bullock & Harlan Crowder, 2001. "Optimizing Customer Mail Streams at Fingerhut," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 31(1), pages 77-90, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:31:y:2001:i:1:p:77-90
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.31.1.77.9691
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.31.1.77.9691
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/inte.31.1.77.9691?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Schröder, Nadine & Hruschka, Harald, 2016. "Investigating the effects of mailing variables and endogeneity on mailing decisions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 250(2), pages 579-589.
    2. Balaji Padmanabhan & Alexander Tuzhilin, 2003. "On the Use of Optimization for Data Mining: Theoretical Interactions and eCRM Opportunities," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(10), pages 1327-1343, October.
    3. Blattberg, Robert C. & Malthouse, Edward C. & Neslin, Scott A., 2009. "Customer Lifetime Value: Empirical Generalizations and Some Conceptual Questions," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 157-168.
    4. Ralf Elsner & Manfred Krafft & Arnd Huchzermeier, 2003. "Optimizing Rhenania's Mail-Order Business Through Dynamic Multilevel Modeling (DMLM)," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 33(1), pages 50-66, February.
    5. Verhoef, Peter C. & Venkatesan, Rajkumar & McAlister, Leigh & Malthouse, Edward C. & Krafft, Manfred & Ganesan, Shankar, 2010. "CRM in Data-Rich Multichannel Retailing Environments: A Review and Future Research Directions," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 121-137.
    6. Meisel, Stephan & Mattfeld, Dirk, 2010. "Synergies of Operations Research and Data Mining," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 206(1), pages 1-10, October.
    7. Ralf Elsner & Manfred Krafft & Arnd Huchzermeier, 2004. "The 2003 ISMS Practice Prize Winner: Optimizing Rhenania's Direct Marketing Business Through Dynamic Multilevel Modeling (DMLM) in a Multicatalog-Brand Environment," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 23(2), pages 192-206, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:31:y:2001:i:1:p:77-90. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.