[thelist] HTML e-mail tracking

[Daniel J. Cody]

Hey Shaun -

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'.

Because your filling in certain fields(subject, to:) with variables, you
could stick an image like this in the body of your html message:

<img
src="http://backtoserver.com/images/emailpromo/djc-members.evolt.org.gif"
height="1" width="1">

Now, since you don't have an image for each of the emails you're sending
too, that IMG call will 404 and get logged in the error_log of your
webserver.

After a day or two, run a script(ask about that if you need help too)
that parses your error_log and finds which images were 404's, and which
email addresses you sent to actually opened the email.

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.

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

.djc.

Shaun Anderson wrote:
> I know that this subject isn't going to make me any friends ( ;-) ) but I've
> been tasked with figuring out how to track who opens an HTML e-mail campaign
> that we're sending out.
>
> I know about the 1 px x 1 px web bugs, but I've also heard from my boss
> about some sort of function (which she described as "HTML open") that would
> also track who opened the e-mails.  She heard about this from the people who
> are actually going to send the e-mail for us (a rented list that's opt-in,
> and market specific).
>
> I know nothing about this.  It sounds like Javascript to me, but that
> doesn't really make any sense to me either.  I don't know that many people
> who have JavaScript enabled in their e-mail client.
>
> Is there something in the header that could be used to track this? How
> reliable might it be?
>
> Another issue that I've been asked to research is how to track what e-mail
> clients people are using.  I know that this information is usually kept in
> the header (if it's sent).  Could this somehow be tracked in conjunction
> with a web bug?