Ok. Awesome..you have a newsletter. You even paid someone who can professionally write one and make it make sense. Ok, I’m with you. Well, besides an articulate newsletter, can you track its’ success? Don’t let it be another Scooby Do Mystery.

Let’s back up and document what a successful newsletter is. For starters it should have some information which brings clients/customers back into your site. They have ordered from you or registered with your site for a reason. THEY WERE INTERESTED. Let’s get those people back and KEEP THEM interested. Mmmm. I wonder how…

A newsletter can be a wonderful tool and also empower an Ecommerce platform. You can broadcast sales, how-to articles, and what’s new pages. You should reward click-thrus as well. Add inline coupons and discounts. Your marketer should realize this and write for it. They should also recognize the “above-the-fold” real estate. They should write for the AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Gmail and high volume personal email boxes. Default text and HTML handlers. Every e-biz is different, but I’ill tell you that a nice email will really help conversions and give you fantastic street cred.

Once you have all the pretty photos and the dynamite sales pitch what are you gonna do next? Well, tracking click-thru and conversions are always a start. Figuring out which link had the most traffic would be cool. Metering sales would be even better especially if they are tied to the traffic. This will give you a really good idea as to what people are interested in. It also validates your customer database. Alright, you have almost solved the case of the “Mo Money Caper”.

The wrap-up. Rewarding and recognizing those customers who bought or registered from your site is extremely important. It creates a vertical that was never there, or one that just plain sucked. Do not discount the newsletter!