Title: Direct mailing decisions based on the worst and best practice cross-efficiency evaluations

Authors: Mahdi Mahdiloo; Abdollah Noorizadeh; Reza Farzipoor Saen

Addresses: Griffith Business School, Gold Coast Campus, Griffith University, QLD 4222, Australia ' Department of Industrial Management, Lappeenranta University of Technology, P.O. Box: 20, 53851 Lappeenranta, Finland ' Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Management and Accounting, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, P.O. Box: 31485-313, Karaj, Iran

Abstract: The problem argued in the literature of direct mailing decisions generally contains three parts: 1) forecasting customers' future purchase/non-purchase responses; 2) evaluating the effectiveness of various strategies for increasing customers purchase responses; 3) prioritising the customers in terms of their values. A significant body of the literature has been dedicated to the first two components, and in particular, to purchase/non-purchase prediction modelling. However, in the current paper, we do not address these two components, but rather we focus on the third component. To this end, data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique and particularly cross-efficiency formulation of the best practice frontier Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (CCR) (Charnes et al., 1978) (BPF-CCR) is used to determine those customers who should be put on the first priorities of marketing mailing list. In addition, the cross-efficiency formulation of worst practice frontier CCR (WPF-CCR) is developed to exclude the worst customers from mailing list and save the mailing expenses for the best practice ones. Using a numerical example, the application of the proposed model is demonstrated.

Keywords: direct mailing; data envelopment analysis; DEA worst practice frontier; WPF; best practice frontier; BPF; cross-efficiency evaluation; marketing mailing lists; customer prioritisation; customer value.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2013.056138

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2013 Vol.14 No.2, pp.182 - 201

Published online: 10 May 2014 *

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