The Iron Rule of RFM

Conversely, you’ll get lower response rates from mailing to customers who have bought less recently, less often and spent fewer total dollars.

Is RFM obsolete?

If you’re thinking that RFM is too old-fashioned for our post-modern world of neural nets, synergy models and so on, think again. Buzzwords like CHAID, regression, data mining and the like all refer to analytical techniques, but to function, these analytical techniques must be applied to real-world data. And that’s what RFM is—three vital chunks of real-world data that we maintain for each customer, and that we use to predict how they’ll respond to our offers.