Abstract: A system and method determines a customer contact strategy that creates associations between customer characteristics and customer responsiveness to direct email campaigns. A plurality of variables relating to historical customer purchasing behavior, and customer responsiveness to direct mail campaigns, are evaluated. In addition, customer responsiveness to direct email campaigns are also evaluated, while also enabling the evaluation of a customer based on customer characteristics and responsiveness. Conventional direct mail campaigns utilize various models to identify customer propensity and prospective customer propensity. The present invention adds to these models a model to determine how well a customer responds to direct email campaigns, and then determines which form of direct contact is preferred at a customer level (i.e., on a customer by customer basis).