[thelist] HTML e-mail tracking

Daniel J. Cody djc at members.evolt.org
Fri Feb 8 14:23:01 CST 2002


Great idea aaron, something I'd never thought of :)

.djc.

Aaron Johnson wrote:
> 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.




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