Preference-based and behavioral targeting are key to optimizing and even monetizing your email marketing programs. The more relevant your communications are the greater and more relevant the response.

At a very basic level, email marketers should allow subscribers to check some key content preferences. This can be used to send them the best version of a newsletter or, better still, a dynamic content email.

To take this a step further, marketers should be creating content that can be categorized by the type (info, offer, call to action) and keywords (topic, category). This information can be used to measure what individuals are clicking on, and by assumption, what they are interested in. Use this behavioral information to target them with similar content in the future.

This is best done using emails with dynamic content but can also be accomplished by planning for some specific versions of each email, with each static version targeted at important preferences or behaviors.

Although a good email marketing platform can measure this stuff and allow you to act on it, not enough email marketers use preference-based and behavioral targeting.

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 11, 2006.