‘‘Direct Mail to Prospects and Email to Current Customers? Managing Multichannel Marketing for Multinational Retailers’’ by Albert Valenti (IESE Business School), ShubaSrinivasan (Boston University), Gokhan Yildirim (Imperial College of London), and Koen Pauwels (Northeastern University)
Understanding own- and cross-channel sales responsiveness to online and offline marketing across customer segments and countries is essential for multichannel multinational retailers. Accordingly, the authors propose a conceptual framework and develop a modeling approach to assess how email and direct mail effectiveness vary by channel, customer value segment, and country. They apply their approach to L’Occitane en Provence and find that own- and cross-channel sales responsiveness to email and direct mail varies by value segment and country. Specifically, direct mail drives offline sales for prospects and email drives both online and offline sales across customer segments in half of the countries. A field experiment provides causal support for the empirical model findings. An effective reallocation of marketing resources would yield a revenue lift of between 16.4% and 9.5%.