Direct Marketing Strategies for Holiday Email Promotions By: Richard Cunningham     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 obvious to the customer begins with a dynamic call to action in the email subject line that is carried throughout the body of the email.” 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 About The Author 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 Article Source: zeronese.net article directory. Article Word Count Appx. : 337 Article Category: Articles » Website-Marketing » email-marketing See all articles by Richard Cunningham Note: Copying of article contents in whole is permitted provided that article body and article author by-lines are kept intact and unchanged. Hyperlinks and/or URLs including article source link provided by authors and/or zeronese must remain active at all times.       The views and opinions of authors expressed on Zeronese Article Directory web sites do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Zeronese.net .