Well.. I am not claiming to be an expert in tracking email marketing campaigns.. But would like to share some points out of my experience..
While working for NatNif.com project, I had to track the emails (in fact XMas greetings) sent by people to others, whether its viewed, whether the viewer has signed up at NatNif.com or no..
Tracking whether the email is viewed
This is possible only if the mail format is HTML. Tracking is achieved by placing a 1X1 image pixel in the body of the image, which carries a unique id for the email to the particular recipient.
The major threats here are,
- Images get displayed only if you allow them in display while viewing the email message.
- You cannot embed a pixel in this way i.e <img src=”track.php?id=3454″ /> . Most of the spam filters will remove such dynamic URLs present in image tags.
Out of the above 2 , we do not have any control on the first one. Second one can be solved replacing the dynamic image URL with a innocent looking URL like ‘track-3454.gif’ . I have used Apache’s mod rewrite to process these innocent looking image URLs and take out the id from it and do the tracking.
Next thing which need to be taken care is the links present in the body of the email messages. We can create links with URLs like
http://www.mysite.com/track.php?id=3454&dest=http://www. mysite.com/actual-destination.html .
So here instead of keeping a direct link to
http://www. mysite.com/actual-destination.html
, we are goinging to the tracking page, which tracks the link clicked and finally shows the real destination. In the tracking page, using the id in the link, we can find out which recipient has clicked and come to the site.
If you have any more related info, please feel free to share.
well, so, putting the 1×1 pixel is the best option to track ? I have seen some stuffs like certified emails goodmailsystems.com etc providing stats of the email campaigns…
and do we have a way to see if the mails are delivered to the spam box or inbox ?
how do we categorise the bounced mails etc and remove them from the emailing list ?
( these were the challenges I have to face when I was designing the bulk mailing servers for buzzintown.com )
Vinod
By putting 1X1 pixel image into the mail content, one can track mail open rate.
As far as I know there is no option to see whether the mail was in spam or inbox. May be someone can add up here.
You can track bounced mails by reading your inbox for bounced mails. Maybe you can define a different reply-to header and get the bounced mails there. Then a shell script can read the mails and read the bounced recipients. (Just my thoughts, I haven’t done any so far)