How to control the effectiveness of a campaign of mailing list marketing: a proposal based on survival analysis

In marketing research, the use of e-mail campaigns represents both a preferred channel for the involvement of new subscribers and an efficient way of communication with registered customers. The recent double use of this tool led to an increasing interest about the availability of data in a business context. The idea behind this paper is to propose an approach to measure the effectiveness of a mailing list marketing campaign. The probability of a negative effect on the customers could be expressed in terms of ineffectiveness rates. This has been estimated using survival models, having available the information about event and times for each observation. In this work, the survival approach is proposed in a marketing research background. This approach is applied to an e-mail subscribers list for a company operating in the healthcare information sector. A survival analysis was conducted through a Cox model considering some risk factors of the subscriber involving personal features and professional roles. The selected model carried to the identification of risk profiles in terms of churn, inactivity and disinterest rates.