Ever send a document to a client or prospect and wonder if they even read it? Now there is a way to track literally everything a recipient does with the PDF's you send as e-mail attachments.  Your days of guessing and wondering are over —here's why.

ReadNotify.com is an e-mail delivery tracking service I wrote about back in June of 2003 (CLICK HERE to see that archive). For less than US$4.00 / month it does an awesome job of tracking every aspect of your sent e-mail. Now however, they have just added the capability to independently track what your recipients do with the attached PDF documents you send their way. Here's how it works...

Your Very Own PDF Spybot

When you send e-mail with one or more PDF's attached with your ReadNotify PDF tracking turned on, ReadNotify will add invisible tracking code to each page of your PDF documents. So now when you send that important contract or proposal as a PDF you will be able to tell the following:

• When it was opened

• Where it was opened

• Who opened it (i.e. the recipient or someone to whom they forwarded it)

• If it was printed

• If it was saved

• Which pages were read and for how long

• Whether it was forwarded or reopened

(CLICK HERE to see a tracking report screenshot for one of my recently e-mailed PDFs where I highlighted some of the more interesting tracking data.)

All of this is tracked even if the document is saved separately from the e-mail it was originally attached to (as long as reader is online when they open it)!  And, this remarkable service is all part of your normal ReadNotify subscription which means it doesn't cost anything extra to track your PDF attachments.

Why This Is So Useful

Imagine sending over a PDF of a contract or listing proposal. With ReadNotify you can see the recipient's level of interest by tracking which pages they read, how long they read the document, how many times, whether they forwarded it and if they printed it out.  This will give you valuable insight into their thinking next time you speak to them about the content of the document.

Now try doing that with the US mail or even FedEx. The best you can hope for is to have proof it was delivered. After that you are in the dark. Being intelligent about business often comes down to having business intelligence —the kind that Readnotify can give you for less than 13 cents a day!