Now you need to understand how to apply these rules to actual optimization problems. Many business problems require several rules working together to achieve the desired behavior.

Problem: To propose the best offers to your customers keeping within the budget and the limitations of your call center and email server capacities and without breaking any internal offer rules.

You know that you get the highest response when someone calls the customer personally, however, a phone call is the most expensive way to deliver an offer. Also, the call center can make only a maximum of 5,000 calls a week and the email servers can send 5 million outbound emails a day. Direct mail gets a better response than email, but the mailing is more than ten times as expensive as an email offer. You have quantified these return rates in a score field you have created by multiplying response rate by profitability. The cost of these offers are contained in the CostPerOffer attribute.

You also have to abide by your customer's wishes. You let your customers choose to opt-out of any or all of your contact channels.

You have multiple offers, but some offers cannot be sent in combination, for example, you do not want to send an offer for free online banking to the same person you send an offer for free checking. In addition, you should never send a worse offer for the same product or service after a better offer. And, you should not overload customers with the same offer.

This can be solved by a single Optimize session. The following rules show one possible solution.

Ensure that you are not violating any of the customer's wishes by creating Exclude/Include rules that enforce opt-out (or opt-in) choices.

Create Customer In rules for each channel to enforce customer's selections for opt-out programs.

Define your limitations. You have a limit on the amount of money you can spend, the number of calls you make, and the number of emails you send. Use these capacity rules:

Create a Min/Max # Offers Capacity rule limiting the number of telemarketing offers per week.

Create a Min/Max # Offers Capacity rule limiting the number of emails sent per day.

Create a Custom Capacity rule to ensure the campaigns are within budget.

Define your offer guidelines. You can use the For Each Customer rules to ensure correct sequencing.

Create a Never A with B rule ensuring free online banking and free checking offers are not sent to the same person.

Create a Never A Followed by B rule ensuring that no one receives a worse credit card offer (Gold APR) after a better credit card offer (Platinum APR).

Ensure that you are not creating contact fatigue. You can use For Each Customer rules to enforce your requirements.

Create Min/Max # Offers For Each Customer rules limiting the number of contacts you send to a customer per channel. By creating two rules for each channel, you can ensure that contacts within the time period are spaced appropriately. If you only had one rule limiting the number of contacts to two per time period, the contacts could happen on the same day.

Create a Max # Duplicate Offers rule to ensure each customer is given a different offer when contacted over a period of time.

Another way to use Optimize is to optimize the generation of a personalized set of coupons.

Problem: You want to send a personalized selection of coupons to your customers while staying within budget constraints and not violating any internal rules or agreements with your suppliers.

Once again, you need to work within a budget. You need to ensure that a coupon booklet mailed to a customer contains enough coupons to be worth mailing and you want to ensure that every customer receives the selection of coupons only once. You also have restrictions based on agreements with your suppliers with contractual minimums and maximums. In addition, certain suppliers do not want their offers given with competitor's offers.

Ensure that you are not violating any of the customer's wishes by creating Exclude/Include rules that enforce opt-out (or opt-in) choices.

Create Customer In rules for each channel to enforce customer's selections for opt-out programs.

Define your limitations. You have a limit on the amount of money you can spend, and you also need to include any supplier limitations. These can be solved with capacity rules:

Create Min/Max # Offers Capacity rules for any offers for which you have a limited number to give out. Only one rule example is shown here, where an actual situation may contain dozens.

Create a Custom Capacity rule to ensure the entire campaign is within budget.

Define your offer guidelines. You can use the For Each Customer rules to ensure no internal guidelines are broken. Only one rule example for each type of rule is shown here, where an actual situation may contain dozens.

Create Never A with B rules to ensure conflicting offers are not sent to the same person.

Create Max # Duplicate Offers rules to ensure each customer only receives one of each type of product.

Ensure that you are not sending out more than one selection of coupons and that each set of coupons is worth sending. You can use a combination of For Each Customer rules to enforce your requirements.

Create Min/Max # Offers For Each Customer rules ensuring defining the number of coupons that can be sent to each customer.

Create a Max # Packages rule to ensure each customer only receives one set of coupons.