Using Community Server to track email newsletter campaigns
I've been sending out email newsletters for around 8 months now - I find them highly effective at keeping uk-mkivs members in touch with the latest news and developments from the world of VW and uk-mkivs. Without them I couldn't pass information on like a conventional forum based service would allow. When I began drawing up plans to generate mass mailing campaigns I was faced with a problem - what to use. Seeing as uk-mkivs runs on Community Server I could of used the in built Mass
Mailer, which can send out on a per role basis and does have crude
subscription management via member selectable controls. However, the
prospect of sending out to 16,000+ email addresses and not having
bounce management gives me a headache just thinking about it, so I thought it
best to find another (separate) product...
After a lengthy search through various products and services I settled on using a piece of software that would reside on the server. I did consider using a third party mailing system but paying for the volume of messages we have would have proved costly, so I decided a one-off purchase may be more cost effective over time given the frequency at which the campaigns are sent. Besides, I'm a bit of teckie so I can fumble my way around things :)
Eventually I settled on a piece of software called Email Marketing Director, which is installed on the same server uk-mkivs runs. The software has all the features I need when it comes to email marketing- like bounce and subscription management, multiple lists and campaigns plus email and web unsubscription options. It even has campaign queuing and throttling which is great for hosted environments - after all the last thing you want is to have your wrists slapped by your hosting company!
Now, before you go running off to take a look at the software, here's were Community Server comes in to play... From the outset of planning and testing my email campaigns I've been using the URL redirect facilities of Community Server to track clicks within the email message. These are in place for various links within the newsletter (like Home, Forums and article links) and do provide an insight into activity that it generates.
However I've never been able to completely track the newsletter in terms of how many people actually open the message. So this got me thinking, how can I track an event like when the newsletter is opened rather than links clicked...
I decided it was time to cheat (ohh the horror!). We all get marketing emails from websites we've bought stuff from, or services we've subscribed to, so I decided to take a look and see how they do it. I had a pretty good idea it would involve a tracking link which is activated when the message is opened but didn't realise it was something as crude and simple as a blank tracking image. When I discovered this I felt like kicking myself, it's so simple an idea I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. The part were community Server comes into play is by using the URL redirects to track how many hits the image receives:
- Create a tracking image comprising of a blank jpg or gif, the same colour as page background or body content. You can place this anywhere in the message you like. I have mine in the header section next to the newsletter edition no. This will help to remind me to change the redirect URL each month so I can track individual emails (I hope)
- Use Community Server's URL redirect facility to create a link to the image stored on your server. Should look something like http://yoursite.com/r.aspx?A
- Embed the URL redirect into your <img src> code within your html code for the email message.
- Lastly, send newsletter and watch the counter go up.
(Well ok, maybe it's not quite as simple as this but you at least get the gist of it.)
After thinking about the implementation and performing some testing I think there may be a few problems that can cause the figures to become skewed:
- Mail servers that scan incoming email content will 'hit' the redirect, this is pretty applicable to all mail servers these days so I'm unsure how effective the redirect will be.
- If images are blocked then it won't trigger the redirect. however as the image doesn't have an extension (as far as html scanners can see) it may bypass this.
- The .aspx extension may cause a similar problem to the above if scripting is blocked.
I can say for sure that from initial results of generating a test campaign I've found that hotmail does block the
tracking image but, Yahoo! mail does not. Corporate Outlook setups also
do not block it, but if the email is delivered to the junk mail folder
in Outlook 2000+ etc. then html is disabled by default.
So unless the user overrides the HTML block, again, the tracking image code won't be processed.
I'm hoping to try out the redirect when I send uk-mkivs May newsletter out tomorrow (Friday 25th May) . I shall endeavour to report back my findings!
You can take a look at an example uk-mkivs Newsletter for those that are interested in what the layout etc. looks like.
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