• Adotas, Thursday, June 1, 2006 10:47 AM

If you're not applying behavioral targeting to your e-mail marketing efforts, you should be, writes Danielle Hickey of Adotas. For some, this may seem elementary, but study after study has shown that a shocking number of e-mail marketers (some representing national brand advertisers) don't target their campaigns beyond demographic and geographic information. (Alright, so I don't have any study in front of me, but I've been covering this business for a while, so trust me.) But, if you collect information about your lists, it's easy enough to deploy some basic behavioral targeting techniques on your own. Past purchase information, for example, will show you that there are some men out there who are interested in buying hand lotion. If you've got a guy on your list who’s shown you he's into hygiene, hit 'em up. Targeting by behavior does a few things: it reduces waste in terms of resources and dollars by delivering fewer but more targeted e-mails, but it also raises CPMs, while keeping conversions in line. E-mail gives you the opportunity to apply your metrics to your user's past behavior. But, as Hickey says, you have to test and keep testing, and soon you will understand your users better, and they you.

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