Optimizing customer mail streams at Fingerhut

Fingerhut mails up to 120 catalogs per year to each of its 7 million custom ers. With this dense mail plan and mailing decisions made independently for each catalog, many customers were receiving redundant and unproductive cat alogs. To identify and eliminate this excessive operational expense, IBM an d Fingerhut together developed an optimization system that selects the most profitable sequence of catalogs, called a mail stream, for each customer. With mail streams, Fingerhut makes better mailing decisions at the customer level, resulting in increased profits. Today, Fingerhut runs this applicat ion weekly to find the most profitable mail stream for each customer.