Sending out a round of promotional emails, through a 3rd party provider, can be a measurably effective way to get the word out about your company, your products and your services.

Aside from the sales or the new clients you could get, there are long range benefits that small business should know about so they can take advantage. Gathering data about who clicked through your promotion to visit your web site is one - and could be particularly important to businesses with a local or regional market. It can also work to establish a mailing list of your own, which is - perhaps - the greatest benefit of all.

When your 3rd party campaign is sent, links to your web pages are embedded in the email and are presented with your promotional content. Recipients of that promotion, hopefully, click on the links in the email and visit your web site.

That's pretty straight forward so far, eh? Let's look at how we can best leverage this new, targeted traffic.

First, do not send a promotional email and provide a link to your homepage. Send them directly to the various pages where the products or services you mention in the promotion are the most prominent features. Better still, create new pages (perhaps just copies of existing pages) that serve up the exact content someone wants when clicking on your links.

IMPORTANT: Do not link to those new pages from anywhere except the email promotion!

Now you'll have your internal stats (logs generated and stored on your web server) to accurately measure the number of times this page is hit. If you don't have access to your log files, or can't make sense of them, add a simple script to gather data about each visit to those pages and write that data directly to your database so that you can view those stats from whatever administration panel your web developer created for you.

These 3rd party providers will give you statistics to show you how often your email was opened, but, with a few lines of code, you can generate your own, customized statistics. That's not to say that these kind folks would fudge on the numbers... It's just that you can do much more if you set up your site for tracking and storing data before you ever send out your promotion.

Record the day and time of each visit, then track where else they go on your site after arrival. If demographics - especially location - is important to you, record the IP address of the computer they were on when they stopped by, and apply an IP address locator to pinpoint their country, state and city.

Now, if your marketing message converts 100% of your visits into sales, you won't need any of this. But, if your conversion rate is less than that, some of these visitors who were interested enough to look at your web pages are getting away - and of those, many of them may never find their way back.

Here's what you can (and should) do about it:

First and foremost, give them some incentive to leave their email address with you (more about that in a second). Load those collected email addresses into your database so that you can market directly to them via email in the future.

Design the incentives you offer so that you gain insight into the purpose of their visit, such as the products in which they were most interested, and record that information also. You're creating a unique opportunity to promote exaclty the good and services these people want.

Now, about this "incentive" you'll offer...

Without knowing the message in your promotional email, I can't be specific about the types of incentives you should offer. However, things that work frequently are:

Detailed Product InformationDownloadable BrochuresNewLettersProduct ReviewsDiscount CouponsRSS Feed Checkers'How To' Guides

If you typically run 50 thousand pieces of email monthly, with a typical click through rate of 7% to 8% , and convert as high as 5% of your visitors, you have the potential to add as many as 3800 interested consumers to your very own email marketing address list every month.

Do that and you'll find that the most effective email marketing out there is the email campaign you run from your own targeted list of interested consumers. That, then, is how you get the greatest benefit from email campaigns run by 3rd party providers.