[thelist] HTML e-mail tracking

[Shaun Anderson]

> One thing that you could try would be tagging images with the email
> address of the person who's getting the email. A couple of things would
> be needed, but heres(bascially) how it works:

> You can a script that fills in users email address, first name(Hi,
> John!), etc and shoots out the email so they're 'personalized'.

Unfortunetly they're sending the e-mails.  I'm not sure if they'll provide
us the ability to do this. I'll have to ask.

> Some people have images turned of for email, or they convert to plain
> text(like me), but on the whole, it shold work for the majority of people.

Me too...

> Hope that helps, shout if you have any other questions or want
> clarification :)

One new question that I doubt really has an answer, but here it goes: What
kind of response rates should we expect?

The list they bought is about 50,000 people, 75%+ of which (supposedly) can
recieve HTML emails.  It's an opt-in list (although I'm a little bit
sceptical) that's mostly teachers, principals and other school related
people. It's 25% teachers, 25% principals (Which seems to be a ratio that's
really off-base).  Half of the people are getting an offer of a free gift,
the other half don't.

There's a pool here to guess how many leads this will generate. Apparently I
was the most pessimistic of the group as I guessed the lowest number(150).
The largest estimate was about made by my boss.  To be considered a "lead"
they need to click on a link in the e-mail, and then  fill out a form. (A
rather long form that requires an address and an e-mail address.  I predict
that less than 3% of people will make it to our website, and then the
drop-out rate after that will huge...

Does anybody have any solid numbers from personal experience?

Thanks :-)

Shaun