Are you sending out marketing material that nobody's reading? It's hard to tell with paper, when you don't know if it goes straight to the recycling bin, but with e-mail marketing, you can tell when your message has been received, opened, or forwarded.

As I mentioned in my previous entry on e-mail marketing, the tracking and reports available through a good e-mail marketing program are pretty impressive. You can track who forwards your mailings most frequently, and whether that results in new subscriptions. If you include links to reference materials or back to your Web site, you can track how many times each of those links was used.

One of the reports you would want to review after a mailing shows you the percentage of members who received the mailing, who didn't, and if the ones that didn't are isolated to certain domains. Another report will tell you if there are technical failures preventing your mailing to get through, or if your messages are being blocked, presumably by over-eager filters sending them to the spam bucket. A quick glance at another report would tell you if you have a significant number of subscribers at that domain.

Of course, the real purpose of the reports is to discover what your subscribers want. If last month's mailing was opened by twice as many readers as this month's, you'll want to study what you did differently and adapt. Fortunately, modifying e-mail marketing materials takes considerably less time than modifying print materials. You'll get the hang of it in no time.

-- Frances

The simplest explanation for e-mail marketing is that it uses e-mail to communicate your expertise to your customers and potential customers. It's an easy, cost-effective, and a fast way to reach a widely diverse audience. You can publish client-focused newsletters via e-mail for a fraction of the cost of mailing printed newsletters.

You're probably on at least one e-mail marketing list... do you get newsletters from the Legal Marketing Association? Or e-mails from Harry & David, Amazon.com or other online retailers, notifying you of sales?

Amazon.com is a great example for e-mail marketing, because they do a mix of regular mailings (daily deals, for example) and targeted messages based on previous purchases. They distinguish themselves from spam by using an opt-in method where you sign up for any updates you want to receive.

The same basic e-mail marketing concept applies for law firms. You can target your audience based on what newsletters they sign up for; some law firms have distinct newsletters for each practice area. Your goal is to provide the reader with information they want and need, using your firm's brand to remind the reader of your firm's expertise on the subject.

There are, of course, difficulties you may encounter in the process; spam filters and the variety of available e-mail programs top the list. What works for Web site design doesn't necessarily work for e-mail programs, and support for HTML e-mails varies from program to program. In fact, it varies so much that the Email Standards Project maintains reports on how the most popular e-mail programs handle HTML e-mails.

Still, the e-mail programs seem like minor obstacles when you see the tracking and reports available. I'll tell you more about that next time.

-- Frances

Mid-February, we launched a new Web site for Curiale Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP, an employment law firm in California. The new Web site for Curiale Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP ("CHK") is a concise, user-friendly site intended as a resource center for the firm's clients. To see what services and features we incorporated into the site, you can read the case study on their new Web site here.

The launch of the new Web site coincided with the announcement of their firm name change. We worked with them to develop a new brand image that would highlight the firm's creativity and extraordinary depth of knowledge in employment law. You can read the case study on their re-branding here.

Much like this year's presidential election, our holidays have become very Web 2.0 oriented. Among online cards and holiday e-mails, Norad continues their annual tradition of tracking Santa Claus's location around the world.

Since 1997, this has included a Web site with updates every 5 minutes showing Santa's progress. For those of you with small children, or anybody interested in the technology, you can view Santa's progress on Norad's site, including an occasional video showing some landmarks he visits.

For everybody else, enjoy the holidays!

-- Frances