I was browsing through some of MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Email Marketing Award winners, and came across this automated email campaign from Les Roches School of Hotel Mgt.

In a nutshell, they have a “request more info” form on their website (see below), where visitors could indicate which school they were interested in attending:

Then, when Les Roches sent their welcome email, it was customized with content that was specific to the recipient’s interests:

Start by adding interest groups to your signup form. Then, customize your welcome email that gets sent whenever someone subscribes to your list. In the welcome email, use MailChimp’s dynamic content merge tags to swap out content based on interest. Here’s how to do all that:

Personalizing Your Welcome Emails in MailChimp

And here’s a merge tag tricks video, where we cover some of those advanced dynamic content merge tags (about 5:30 into the tutorial):