Patent ID: 8775334

Claim:
A campaign planning server for prioritizing campaign messages from a program of campaign messages, a campaign message having a list of potential recipients associated therewith, the campaign planning server comprising a campaign planner that comprises: a decision tree generator that is configured to select one or more targeted recipients that are outside the list of potential recipients for the campaign message and adding the one or more targeted recipients to the list of potential recipients, the decision tree generator further configured to generate a decision tree for at least one of the campaign messages in a program of campaign messages, the decision tree comprising a hierarchy of attributes of past recipients of the at least one of the campaign messages that segments decisions among a hierarchy of subgroups of the past recipients, wherein individual attributes within the hierarchy of attributes include whether individual ones of the past recipients purchased a product included in the at least one of the campaign messages and whether the individual ones of the past recipients viewed the product included in the at least one of the campaign messages; a decision tree evaluator that is configured to apply attributes of a one of the potential recipients to the decision tree to obtain a metric of potential value of the at least one of the campaign messages to the one of the potential recipients, wherein the metric of potential value represents a measure of effectiveness in attracting a response from the one of the potential recipients to the at least one of the campaign messages based at least upon a total number of campaign messages previously received by the one of the potential recipients; a selector configured to prioritize the at least one of the campaign messages for the one of potential recipients by selecting a subset of the campaign messages for sending to the one of potential recipients based upon the metric of potential value of the at least one of the campaign messages; and wherein the evaluating performed by the decision tree evaluator and the selecting performed by the selector are repeated for the program of campaign messages until all potential recipients in the list of potential recipients have been evaluated and selected.