Dynamically Managing a Profitable Email Marketing Program
利用美国一家家装零售商的数据，通过隐马尔可夫和Copula框架研究客户邮件打开与购买行为，发现邮件活跃客户不一定购买活跃，并提供了最优邮件发送数量的决策支持。
Although email marketing is highly profitable and widely used by marketers, it has received limited attention in the marketing literature. Extant research has focused on either customers’ email responses or the “average” effect of emails on purchases. In this article, the authors use data from a U.S. home improvement retailer to study customers’ email open and purchase behaviors by using a unified hidden Markov and copula framework. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors find that email-active customers are not necessarily active in purchases, and vice versa. Furthermore, the number of emails sent by the retailer has a nonlinear effect on both the retailer's short- and long-term profitability. Through a counterfactual study, the authors provide a decision support system to guide retailers in making optimal email contact decisions. This study shows that sending the right number of emails is vital for long-term profitability. For example, sending four (ten) emails instead of the optimal number of seven emails can cause the retailer to lose 32% (16%) of its lifetime profit per customer.