You can hardly read a business magazine these days without being reminded of ROI, Return on Investment. From an email marketing perspective, understanding this number helps you determine where to put your advertising dollars, which campaigns are performing best, what percentage of your dollars are turning directly into income, and how much it costs you to find and retain customers.

Fortunately, email marketing makes it easy to track your ROI.

Here are three really simple ways to track your ROI:

1. Associate specific products to each email broadcast and track their sales. This allows you to see exactly which emails help sell which products.

2. Embed hyperlinks within your emails that lead users to special landing pages on your web site where users can purchase products. This allows you to track sales specifically arising from the email.

3. Use a hyperlink in your email to connect to your general web site, where you ask customers to fill out a simple form indicating how they heard about you. This allows you to distinguish customers who find you via your emails from those who find you via other means such as search engines.

When you begin tracking your email marketing ROI, keep in mind that, like any advertising, email marketing campaigns may take several efforts to get results. Also consider more than your short-term sales results. Email marketing also serves to boost your customer loyalty, strengthen your branding, and improve new customer acquisition over the long-term.

As you consider ROI metrics, be sure to distinguish between short-term and long-term results.