Let’s face it, although social networking and time on twitter, facebook and other social sites has grown to eclipse email, many folks still spend a great deal of time in email.

Listimonkey is a great tool for tracking Twitter conversations on demand in email.
Receiving filtered tweets and Twitter list digests in your inbox may sound strange at first, but it has many benefits:

1. Social media in your email isn’t new any more.  With Google Buzz already in Gmail, many folks are already using social media within their email client.
2. Tracking keyword combinations or Twitter List conversations by email might be easier than using a twitter client for some folk – particularly social media beginners.
3. Monitoring conversations in email  makes social media more manageable by reducing time spent looking at Twitter clients for relevant tweets and conversations.
4. Monitor more conversations. By monitoring multiple keyword phrases by email, twitter clients like seesmic, tweetie and tweetdeck can be focused on fewer keywords.
5. Digests are a great way to stay up to date with social media happenings on days when traveling, or computers and handhelds are not at hand.  Spring is here, heck maybe we’ll spend more time in the garden if we know we’ll be kept in the loop by email.

In short, Listimonkey could make it easier for social media users to measure and monitor conversations.

Check out this clever email campaign from the Canadian Tourism Commission.  CTC used a simple technology (email) and stretched the boundaries of what you might expect.  Usually forcing folks to use a scroll bar is way off limits, but this little email was fun,creative, and inexpensive.

Check it out online to get the whole experience:
http://newsletters.canada.travel/ca/localsknows_nov2009/mailer-en2.html

Sending email newsletters is still the most effective way of making our phone ring.  Today, I read an interestng post that highlighted all the challenges with measuring the impact of your email with traditional open rates for email newsletters.

Email tracking tools utilize a small image to track when an email is opened.  Unfortunately, this opens all kinds of challenges for email newsletters that are opened in a phone, or email client with images disabled.  In short, these don’t get counted.  In addition, when email is viewed in the preview pane, these also are not tracked and counted.

Read the interested email measurement post at Email Insider.

For me, the success of email marketing is generally tracked best by counting the number of phone calls or emails that the campaign generates or click throughs to the Web site.  Indeed these are true measures of email engagement.  As for open rates, this is an almost useless statistic.

I’m always looking for new Email Marketing Newsletter tools to share with folks who are interested in what is the most cost-effective online marketing medium. With ROI of over $45 for every $1 spent, isn’t it time you invested in an Email Marketing Newsletter Tool? Here are four more to consider:

HTML Email Marketing from MailChimp

http://bronto.com/

VerticalResponse | Email Marketing and Direct Mail Postcards

Emma Email Marketing | Email Marketing Solutions | Email Newsletters

Before you choose, take a few email newsletter marketing tools for a test run, most offer a free trial. Then consider:

• can you track your campaigns – measuring opens and click throughs?
• can you build your list and manage unsubscribes easily?
• what is the long term cost to send email?
• is it easy to import and export your data?

In all likelihood, once you start with an email newsletter marketing tool, you’ll stick with them for quite a while, so take your time choosing . . . but don’t wait to get started. With the return on investment so high, get started today.