Empirical Investigations on the Effectiveness of Direct Marketing Communications

The goal of this dissertation is “toempirically study the effectiveness of retailer’s direct marketing communications, by zooming in on customer, content and incentive characteristics”. In Essay 1 (Calling Customers to Take Action: The Impact of Incentive and Customer Characteristics on Direct Mailing Effectiveness), I look into how customer and incentive characteristics affect the effectiveness of CTA direct mailings at the disaggregate level (consumer response) for a group optical retailers. In Essay 2 (Do store flyers trigger cross-category sales? The moderating role of categories’ relatedness), I examine how the content of store flyers influences its effectiveness at the aggregate level (category sales), for a retailer active in a durable goods sector. More specifically, I look into the influence of the share of space allocated to each category on own and cross-category sales. In Essay 3 (Decomposition of VAT-free promotion effects: The role of loyalty program membership and category characteristics), I study the impact of a new type of incentive, communicated via print direct marketing, on retailer’s sales performance, and how this effect varies across customers (LP members vs. non-LP members) and across categories, again at the aggregate level (store and category sales) and in the durable goods sector.