A Framework for Direct Marketing with Business Intelligence: An Illustrative Case Study in Retailing

Direct Marketing has become a key strategy for businesses to develop strong customer relationships, which is a marketing method that targets specific customers with personalised advertising and promotional campaigns. Business Intelligence tools, in turn, are effective tools for advanced data analysis and decision support. However, to utilise Business Intelligence tools in direct marketing is not a straightforward task since it requires expert knowledge of various functions provided by Business Intelligence as well as a good understanding about direct marketing practice. This study focuses on developing efficient and effective way of applying Business Intelligence tools for direct marketing processes. A formalised and structured Direct Marketing Process Framework (DMPF-BI) has been introduced using BI tools as an integrated system platform. To evaluate the framework, a sale promotion related data set of a well known UK supermarket has been used for assessments. It demonstrates the robustness and usefulness of our framework in the context of direct marketing in retailing.