Identifying Your Best Customers: Descriptive, Predictive and Look-Alike Profiling

Database marketers typically attempt to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns by targeting their best customers. Unfortunately, many database marketers are unaware that typical target methods develop a descriptive profile of their target customer — an approach that often results in less-thansuccessful campaigns. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the inadequacy of the

descriptive

approach and to demonstrate the benefits of the correct

predictive profiling

approach. I explain the predictive profiling approach, and then expand the approach to Look-Alike profiling.