Patent ID: 8135608

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for conducting a marketing campaign comprises: receiving by one or more computers scores associated with sending offers to proposed contacts belonging to a pool of customers; randomly assigning customers in the pool of customers into predetermined groups of customers; and optimizing by the one or more computers an overall campaign score corresponding to a sum of the received scores, with optimizing generating optimal assignments of offers to customers that satisfy for-each-customer (FEC) constraints and cross-customer (CC) constraints, the FEC constraints controlling communication to an individual customer and the CC constraints representing resources shared among the pool of customers, the optimal assignments of offers for inclusion in the marketing campaign; by: determining a first assignment of offers for a first group of customers that maximizes a sum of scores for the first group and complies with the FEC constraints and the CC constraints; and determining by the one or more computers subsequent assignments of offers for the remaining groups using information associated with determining the first assignment, the subsequent assignments maximizing the sums of scores for the remaining groups and complying with the FEC constraints and the cross-customer constraints, the optimal assignments including the first assignments and the subsequent assignments.