External Data Selection for Data Mining in Direct Marketing

Today the purchase of external data is necessary for most direct marketing applications. No company can refer to the internal data alone, especially when targeting new customers. This paper discusses an integrated approach detailing how to select external data sources properly. For that, we try to standardize the selection process, to make it repeatable and to give practical hints in order to overcome handling issues. Therefore, we talk about tools, experiences and perspectives. We start with a detailed problem description and then develop a general process model. In subsequent sections, we discuss how to collect, measure and aggregate the selection criteria without loosing too much information quality.