Interactive Campaign Planning for Marketing Analysts

Event sequence data is generated across nearly every domain from social network activities and online clickstreams to electronic health records and student academic activities. Patterns in event sequences can provide valuable insights to assist people in making important decisions, such as business strategies, medical treatments, and careers plans. EventAction is a prescriptive analytics tool designed to present and explain recommendations of event sequences. EventAction provides a visual and interactive approach to identify similar records, explore potential outcomes, review recommended action plan that might help achieve the users' goals, and interactively assist users as they define a personalized action plan. This paper presents the first application of EventAction in the digital marketing domain. Our direct contributions are: (1) a report on two case studies that evaluate the effectiveness of EventAction in helping marketers prescribing personalized marketing interventions and (2) a discussion on four major challenges and our solutions in analyzing customer records and planning marketing interventions.