Predicting customer behavior is never an easy task, even for a company whose focus is predicting the weather up to a year in advance. Weather Trends International, which provides climate data to corporations like Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson, and Target, knew that many of its B2B clients didn't click through its weekly newsletter, and wanted to understand why.

"We changed email providers last summer and wanted to use that opportunity to run tests to see if we could increase our open rates and click-throughs," says Bill Martin, WTI's vice president of marketing. "We theorized that if the content was more personalized, we'd be able to improve the statistics. Even though our clients are paying for the newsletter, we knew if they interacted with the content there was a better chance they'd renew the subscription."

Last summer WTI began personalizing the weekly newsletter it sends to clients and prospects. Partnering with Eloqua, WTI collects information about its customers (and the employees at those companies who receive the email). The newsletter includes weather information for the upcoming week, special features like a holiday outlook, a five-minute podcast, and links to weather information for more than 4,000 cities worldwide. Each email also contains the recipient company's logo, information pertinent to their location and industry, and occasionally a personalized subject line as well.

For example, the newsletter sent to Black & Decker includes predictions of hurricanes and other natural disasters to highlight areas where tools may be needed for preparation and cleanup. Branding each copy with the company's logo made much more of an impact than changing subject lines, Martin says.

"Many of our subscribers consider this the same as an internal company memo because it's so targeted toward them," Martin says. "Immediately when we introduced this new format, all our statistics began tracking up."

Prior to last summer WTI experienced a typical email open rate of 2 to 4 percent. Today, Martin says, he typically sees double digits for both open and click-through rates. "For a small company of less than 30 people and less than $10 million a year in revenue, the fact that we can use the same tools as a Fortune 500 company and see these kinds of results is great," Martin says.

As an added bonus, WTI's conversion rate for prospects that receive the newsletter has increased more than 100 percent over the past year, something Martin attributes primarily to the personalized messaging and graphics. Since the email campaigns integrate with WTI's salesforce.com CRM system, his team is able to track every prospect that becomes a customer through the newsletter.

"Being such a small company we look for all of our partners to integrate with our CRM system," Martin says. "We want to know exactly who our customers are and how they're interacting with us."

The success of its email campaigns has prompted WTI to consider adding lead scoring, as well as automated program builder tools to replace manual processes the marketing team currently uses readying its weekly messages.

"Our customers are major corporations that have these capabilities to enhance their customer relationships, and we want to reach that level too, despite our size," Martin says. "It's the logical next step."