Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics: Real World Cases and Data Sets for Hands On Learning

14. Retail Relay Revisited

Introduction

Because Retail Relay (Relay) was operating like a start-up—all employees scrambling around to get everything done in the face of rapid growth—some important business processes had been left unattended. One of the processes that received little attention was how to use the customer-level purchase information in Relay’s database to improve customer retention.

Relay understood that many of its existing customers were not only spending money with Relay, but were also purchasing some of their grocery products from other vendors as well. This kind of customer behavior was evident from even a casual examination of the customer-level purchase data. Some customers purchased from Relay infrequently and sporadically, ...