Data Mining in Direct Marketing Databases

In direct marketing large amounts of customer data are collected that might have some complex, non linear relation to customer behavior. Data mining techniques can ooer insight in these relations. In this paper we give a basic introduction in the application of data mining to direct marketing. Best practices for data selection, algorithm selection and evaluation of results are described and illustrated with a number of real world cases. We suggest two lines of research which we consider important to put data mining in the hands of the marketeer: automating data mining techniques and integration of data mining in an open knowledge management framework.