Saturday, April 17, 2010

Email tracking options?

Our department sends out marketing emails on a weekly basis and would like to get a feel for the number of users opening the email and/or clicking through the links within the email.





I've read about pixel tracking, which is not the best option since several email clients now have images turned off to prevent tracking. In addition, I've seen articles that tell you to add an image link to the HTML email and will be picked up in the web logs for further processing. The link looks something like this:





%26lt;img src=http://www.yoursite.com/tracking.asp... width=1 height=1%26gt;





The articles I've read say this link will be processed when the email is opened but I can't figure out how. Is the page actually being processed and sent to the web server? I've tried using this process with no success. The email is being sent but I am unable to see any tracking results from the logs. Help!

Email tracking options?
Using the %26lt;img src=http://www.yoursite.com/tracking.asp... width=1 height=1%26gt;


method will work if the e-mail client opens the mail as a web page. The image will be pulled from your server and your serverlogs should show how many times the image was viewed.
Reply:That link is an image, so it will only be processed if the receiving e-mail client has images enabled.





This is exactly why people turn off images in e-mail - they don't want you to be able to track them. There is no way to force someone to tell you when they've read your message.


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