Tracking incoming e-mails

Marketing program tracks e-mail responses
Steve Culver knows where you’re coming from. Literally. Culver, president of Computer 911 in Milwaukee, is setting up e-mail response addresses, allowing him to track his marketing efforts.
It’s not unlike the tracking often seen for regular mail responses, where a vendor might ask prospects to respond to something like “Department SI” at the vendor’s postal address. In that example, he’d know that the prospect saw the advertisement in Sports Illustrated.
That practice has been taken to the Internet to allow similar tracking, says Culver, whose firm rescues computer users in distress.
Culver is also tracking visits to his Website in a similar way.
“We want to know if someone is visiting our Website or sending an e-mail query as the result of seeing the ad,” he said.
While he called his response so far “disappointing,” he admitted that the nature of his business might preclude responses via the Internet.
“Most people who require our services need us because they want to, need to, but can’t access the World Wide Web and e-mail. That may be because they don’t have the computing power and/or the technical savvy to make it happen.”
Culver says he’s seeing use of the specified e-mail response addresses in the high-tech arena, especially in the computer trade magazines.
But the practice hasn’t come into widespread use among the general business community, even though Culver says it’s relatively easy to do.
“Any Internet service provider (ISP) should be able to host a company’s Internet domain name and set up any number of aliases for your e-mailbox for a small fee,” he notes. “We host Websites for our customers on our Web server. Every Website includes a mailbox that is usually named ‘info@mydomain.com.’ Additional mailboxes and aliases can be set up easily.”
The “alias” would be the tracking e-mail address.
While Culver offers the service through Websites, he notes that a Website isn’t necessary for e-mail tracking.
Culver is a big fan of e-mail. “E-mail is a great tool,” he says. “I tell my clients that the surest way to get a quick response from me, other than in an emergency, is to send me an e-mail.”
April 1998 Small Business Times, Milwaukee