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