Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the optimal contact policies for customers that belong to the mass affluent market. Design/methodology/approach – The authors formulate a stochastic dynamic programming model to determine the optimal frequency of contacts in order to maximize the expected return of the company. Findings – The authors show that personalized marketing strategies provide a competitive advantage to companies that contact their customers directly through, for example, phone calls or meetings. The authors show that a threshold policy is only optimal for customers with increasing sensitivity to contact. In all other cases, optimal policies might have a less intuitive structure. The authors also study the importance of the size of the customer database and determine the optimal maximum recency when maintenance costs are present. Practical implications – Contact policies should be tailored for each company/industry individually, due to their sensitivity to customers' purchasing behavior.