Tis the season to leverage customer interest data for successful email marketing.

All of the information gathered throughout the year from customer purchases, customer feedback surveys, and other behavior offers direct marketers necessary direction for conceptualizing a successful email campaign.

Further, these customer data strengthen email promotions, ensuring the best possible message targets each individual customer. In the audio book, “Sound Advice on Email Marketing,” author Peter McCormick sites the example of a sporting goods retailer that uses customer knowledge to devise a series of successful promotions. Offers for discounts on golf clubs, golf vacations, and pro golfer apparel specials speak to a particular set of customers’ affinity for golf.

As with any direct mail campaign, one key to optimizing customer response is compelling each customer to open the email. Here, McCormick says attention to the email subject line is crucial, and suggests one winning strategy is to incorporate the call-to-action – what you want your customer to do – into the subject line. McCormick says, “Don’t let your message get lost on the customer. The key to making the message

For the golf fanatic, combining knowledge of recent purchases with a call to action might result in a subject line, ‘John, pack your new clubs for these golf vacation discounts’. Within the email promotion, the body content would reinforce taking specific action on these discounts – from clicking to learn more about the featured golf resorts to reserving accommodations and tee times.

According to McCormick, “Leveraging this [customer] data with the correct promotion is the key to a successful email campaign.”

Peter McCormick offers advice on email marketing strategies each week in the free audio newsletter from What’s Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz/full_story.asp?ArtID=92

Richard Cunningham is a principal of What’s Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz, a publisher of business audiobooks and online audio programs on marketing, sales, and small business strategies.