RFM rankings can be used as the basis for segmentation. Segmentation assists with targeting the market or the segment of the database who is most likely to respond to the marketing effort. For example, if your marketing department is trying to mail the company contact of their best conference attendees, they might look for:
■ Recency going back 5 years
■ Frequency of attendance being greater than ten times attending (because this would imply that at least two attendees from that company attended within those 5 years)
and
■ Value = to increments of conference registration because that's the value of their attendance (anyone with a value higher than that might have purchased books at the conference or made a donation above and beyond the registration fee).
You can use the same ranking model against different groups or populations within your database to be able to make predictions and better target who is most likely to respond to a particular marketing effort. The RFM rankings may look the same, but the numbers within each rank may be quite different.