[thelist] HTML e-mail tracking

[Aaron Johnson]

Piggybacking on this discussion...


> <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.
 -- one up ya.  Have the img src point to a server side
script(CF/ASP/PHP/Servlet), have that script log the hit to a database
and then use the server side script to modify the header content and
return an image to the client.  We use this method in our own email
marketing tool and not only does it cut out the parsing of the error
log, but it's live.. we've been able to see in real time how many people
are opening and viewing the emails we send, which is pretty cool.  All
of this of course assumes that the user has images turned on, which I'm
guessing most NON technical users don't know they can turn off, IMHO.

AJ