Do Marketing Campaigns Produce Multichannel Buying and More Profitable Customers? A Field Experiment

44 Pages Posted: 6 Sep 2012 Last revised: 21 Aug 2013

See all articles by Elisa Montaguti

Elisa Montaguti

Department of Management, University of Bologna

Scott Neslin

Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business

Sara Valentini

Bocconi University

Date Written: August 19, 2013

Abstract

One of the most intriguing and managerially relevant findings in the multichannel customer management literature is the positive association between multichannel purchasing and customer profitability. The question is whether this is an actionable, causal relationship. We design and implement a randomized field experiment to investigate this issue. The field experiment tests four marketing campaigns that vary in the communications message and the provision of financial incentives. We find that the multichannel/profitability relationship indeed is actionable. A properly designed marketing campaign increases the number of multichannel customers and increases average customer profitability. That campaign’s message emphasizes the benefits of multichannel shopping but does not rely on financial incentives. Moreover, we estimate a switching regression to show that, after accounting for self-selection bias, multichannel customers are more profitable than they would be if they were single channel. These results are important because they provide insights on how multichannel shopping leads to higher profit.

Keywords: Multichannel marketing, field experiment, CRM

JEL Classification: M31, C93

Suggested Citation

Montaguti, Elisa and Neslin, Scott and Valentini, Sara, Do Marketing Campaigns Produce Multichannel Buying and More Profitable Customers? A Field Experiment (August 19, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2141824 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2141824

Elisa Montaguti (Contact Author)

Department of Management, University of Bologna ( email )

Via capo di lucca, 34
Bologna, 40126
Italy

Scott Neslin

Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business ( email )

Hanover, NH 03755
United States

Sara Valentini

Bocconi University ( email )

Via Roentgen, 1 (4th floor)
Milan, 20136
Italy

HOME PAGE: http://https://marketing.unibocconi.eu/people/sara-valentini

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