Tracking clickthroughs - email

[whereami]

I work for a small investment brokerage company and I need a way to see which of my clients are reading the research I send them.

Here is the rundown of the situation. I need a way to send out an HTML newsletter to +-200 contacts and see:

1). Who opened it (through a picture in the email loading -- I understand how unreliable that is, but that's the best I can do)
2). Who clicked on the link in the newsletter
3). The link will take them to my website with a short questionnaire, upon the completion of which, they will be able to download the PDF with the research. I would also like to track who downloads this PDF (by identifying it with a person on my list).

I've looked through some scripts, but I can't seem to find any that would be able to track who downloaded the PDF (basically, pass down a unique string from the newsletter link to the webpage).

If anybody knows of software under $100, I would highly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance

[ghippleh]

as far as Identifying who clicked the link you could track their IP address which is a indentifier. It maybe hard though to determine who belongs to which IP address but you could always perform a whois search and find out who their ISP and from there figure who is who. Its not much help but maybe it might get you on track.

[LeeU]

You might want to be aware that many people do not appreciate others tracking what they do with their e-mail. I have read where it has caused many people to drop mailing lists that do that. Tracking when they click on a link to your site (at your site) is one thing but for many they don't appreciate it when others can tell even whether they have read it on their own system. It's kind of a privacy issue, just so you know.

[ghippleh]

Thats a good point.