If you run a sales team for a local or regional company, or you sell for your own company, and you’ve got an effective Web site, it’s time to do two things:

1) Start writing an email newsletter, and 2) Use SalesGenius.com, or a similar service, to track your newsletter marketing efforts.

SalesGenius gives you a way to send customized emails to your prospects and customers, track who opened them (and when), see who then clicked through to your Web site, and then track where they went when they got there, including how long they spent there.

In fact, some of this feedback you can see in real-time, as people actually open your emails. All you provide, I suppose, is the breathing down their neck.

But seriously, imagine sending a time-sensitive offer to your best customers, and knowing that 73% of them opened the email, 54% of those people clicked through to your website, and then, on a contact by contact basis, seeing what pages they visited at your site.

When you’re selling to someone face-to-face, you can make adjustments to your approach on the fly, as you judge how the other person interprets what you’re asking and saying. You obviously lose that element of body language with email.

But what you gain with SalesGenius, on the other hand, is powerful insight into your email recipients’ real behaviors, as they react (or don’t react) to your email messages.

And one other advantage here is that it takes no IT back-end work, so just about any halfway-Internet-savvy sales manager could run it. You can even download a Microsoft Outlook plug-in to manage email campaigns from within that.

We’ve tested it out a bit. Within about 5 minutes from filling in the free registration form to completion, we had sent and watched initial progress on an email message. That’s fast and easy setup. Impressive.

Now, you’re staring $49 per month in the face here, $79 if you want the full-on interactive features. That’s not nothing.

And the service isn’t without its warts. For example, customers don’t see your Web site address in their Internet browser, but http://www.yoursite.rsvp1.com — the rsvp1 gets snuck in there. Could be confusing, if they pay attention to such things.

But if you’re already sending out, or preparing to send out, an email newsletter, you really ought to consider this to supplement your sales efforts. If you don’t want to see every last page they visited at your site, for half the price you can always use Aweber, GetResponse, or Constant Contact, which all offer outsourced email newsletter marketing services, with limited link-click-tracking.

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