Optimizing Customer Assignments to Direct Marketing Activities: A Binary Linear Programming Formulation

Abstract

Direct marketing has become a fundamental advertising method in many industries. In direct marketing, companies target specific customers with personalized product offers. By optimally assigning customers to direct marketing activities, the effectiveness of direct marketing campaigns can be greatly increased. In this paper, we study a real-world customer assignment problem of a leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland. The planning problem contains many business and customer-specific constraints that have not yet been covered in the literature. We propose a binary linear programming formulation that solves instances involving up to one million customers and over 100 direct marketing activities to optimality in short running time. The novel formulation delivers substantially better solutions in terms of expected profit than the current practice at the company.