Guardrailed Uplift Targeting: A Causal Optimization Playbook for Marketing Strategy

Abstract

This paper introduces a marketing decision framework that converts heterogeneous-treatment uplift into constrained targeting strategies to maximize revenue and retention while honoring business guardrails. The approach estimates Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) with uplift learners and then solves a constrained allocation to decide who to target and which offer to deploy under limits such as budget or acceptable sales deterioration. Applied to retention messaging, event rewards, and spend-threshold assignment, the framework consistently outperforms propensity and static baselines in offline evaluations using uplift AUC, Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS), and Self-Normalized IPS (SNIPS). A production-scale online A/B test further validates strategic lift on revenue and completion while preserving customer-experience constraints. The result is a reusable playbook for marketers to operationalize causal targeting at scale, set guardrails, and align campaigns with strategic KPIs.