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Brandsend
9 Posts |
 Posted - Jul 20 2007 : 12:12:02
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Does anyone have a recommendation for an email tracking software that could be used in conjunction with MLK? I'd like to be able to track open rates, click-thru's, message forwarding, etc.
If anyone is using anything, please let me know. Also, if possible, I'd like to request this functionality in later releases.
-Thanks. |
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xequte
7042 Posts |
Posted - Jul 21 2007 : 19:45:59
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Hi
There is no reliable way to track message opening or forwarding these days. Any vendor who tells you otherwise is telling porkies. The only methods available (read receipts and linkes embedded images) are now blocked by default by all major mail software (Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, etc) and/or prompt the user to confirm the action. So I don't recommend that.
Click thru tracking on the other hand is very doable and good marketing policy.
Unfortunately, at present, MLK does not have any automated way of doing this. However you can do it either by analyzing your web logs or settings up a web form that records (or sends notification) whenever someone clicks through (and then it would redirect them to their desired page).
When sending from MLK you use personalization fields to embed the member ID or email address in the link so that you can track the user.
The process has been discussed on various occasions on our web forum. So you might want to search those articles first and let us know if you need more detail.
Nigel
Xequte Software
nigel@xequte.com |
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justuspost
USA
71 Posts |
Posted - Jul 23 2007 : 15:10:21
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I'll second Nigel on this one. If someone is selling you a 'reliable' method to track open rates, forwarding or other mail tracking functions, I got a bridge to sell you at the Bonneville salt flats. :-)
For click through tracking:
You can easily create a redirect page on your server that will simply allow you to track click through. Once the page is in place, you will just look at your web stats (however you track them) and see how many hits that file got.
IE: Header Banner from e-mail point to redirect page 1 (googleredir1.html)
redirect page 1 (googleredir1.html) points to google.com (whoever the banner is suppose to go to)
Then on your web stats, just look for (googleredir1.html) and see how many times that file was accessed. That will tell you how many people clicked on a banner or link that took them to that page then were redirected to the other site.
On the redirect page you could even toss in advertisements or your own logo so they have to stare at it for X time before being redirected.
You can do 1 redirect per link per newsletter or 1 redirect page per newsletter for all your links or 1 redirect for a specific link on all your newsletters. Mix and match, have fin with it. :-)
Note: content="0; can be changed to any number of seconds. This is the delay that the page takes before redirecting the user.
content="10; would mean they sit at this page for 10 seconds before being redirected to the link that follows. (Make sure the link works and is not to a secure area.)
<code>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Yoursite.com</title>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.google.com/">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
</code>
Hope this helps!
For MLK to do this tracking, it would need access to the web stats and write ability to the web server to place the redirect pages. I've seen systems do it, but not stand alones like MLK.
Justus
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Message Tracking
