Is it possible make a poll - survey directly within the email?
for example: the user receive this email with a poll inside, he click one of the answers and the system take his vote.
so the voting takes place within the email and doesn’t redirect to another page.
I would like to use or mailchimp or campaign monitor, I know that there is some tools that can make this job, but I don't know if it is possible register the vote without a redirect.
Even MailChimp says that trying to poll entirely within the email is a bad idea. They have some simple tools to ask a single question in an email, but those also take users to an external web page too.
Related
My goal is to make a website, in which user could customize a photo and then provide his friends indicators like name or id. My next task is to fetch that info from database and send messages on specific date to provided users. Ex birthday wishes, greetings, and so on.
I studied facebook send api for a few days now and couldn't find solution for myself. If I want to send message, I need to have Page-scoped id of user, which is acquired when the person text you first, which is not desired, because person wouldn't know what it is.
Also I was looking into Customer matching API, also seems to require the same PSID. The next thing I checked was Send Dialog API, which seems to send messages instantly, but not on the specific date. Also I checked unofficial facebook-chat-api, which asks for user ID, whereas I can find my id, I couldn't find ids of my friends.
So I just want to know is it even possible, if yes, I'd really appreciate your help.
User to User communication is not possible (and not allowed) in an automatic way, there is no API for it except for the Send Dialog. The Messenger platform is for page to user communication only.
Do not use inofficial tools, they are not allowed and might get you banned.
looking for a little advice on HTML emails and GDPR re-permission.
With the new GDPR regulations I have to create an email to send out to an existing list requesting their consent to continue contacting them.
My intention is to have an 'I'm in' button in the email, which when clicked takes the user to another page/url which has a simple form on it requesting the users email address and checkbox for them to tick to opt in.
My question is can I achieve this another more simple way. For example in the email itself when the user clicks the 'I'm in' button, can a post submission be made automatically with their email address, that gets sent to clients email, and they then just get re-directed to a standard success message. Is something like this possible? It would save having to create a form somewhere and make the process easier for the user.
I don't normally do HTML emails so I'm a little unsure - any help on this would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance
Yes, you could embed their email in the query string of the URL and then have a webapp at that URL pick up their email from the querystring and process it. Obviously you'd need to code the webapp side accordingly.
E.g:
I'm in!
If you can still send an email to the user, the collection of consent can be quite simple. It will be sufficient to send each user an email containing a link to accept the newsletter (e.g. "Yes, I want to receive the newsletter"). The email should also contain the terms and conditions of the service, and the privacy policy. What come next can be either automated, or handled manually.
The best option would be to automate the process. This can be done in multiple way, the simplest being with a customized link for each user pointing to a website capable of interpreting the data transmitted by the link itself. To achieve this result, the link contained in each email should contain an identification code - which should be anonymized where possible - so that it will be possible to link the new consent to each user. In this way, when the user clicks the link, he or she will be taken to the website. At that point, the backend will be able to collect the code passed by the link, identify the user and, finally, re-subscribe the user to the newsletter.
In practical terms, in the email there could be a link with a value to be passed as a `GET« parameter:
Yes, I want to receive the newsletter
The server-side logic could be as follows (in PHP synthax):
// re-subscribe.php
$uuid = $_GET['uuid'];
$user = getUserByUUID($uuid); // assumed function that gets the user infos by a UUID
subscribeUser($user); // assumed function that re-subscribes user to the newsletter
echo 'Thank you!'
This could even be accomplished manually, provided that a link tracker service/tool is used.
In this – less ideal – case, in the email there should only be a single clickable link, the one required to express consent (e.g. "Yes, I want to receive the newsletter"). This link could take the user wherever deemed most appropriate. What matters, in this case, is the ability, through the tracker service/tool, to know which users have clicked the link. As long as there is only one link in the email, this would inform us that the user has expressed his or her consent, and thus we could manually re-subscribe them to the newsletter. In this case, the link to the terms and conditions and to the privacy policy should be included as static text, and not as an actual clickable link.
For more info, check out our blog post, inspired by this question, at blog.autoprivacy.eu/2018/05/newsletters-after-gdpr-existing-and-new.html
Does SendGrid support double opt-in to Lists as a feature or is that something we will have to implement for ourselves?
https://sendgrid.api-docs.io/v3.0/contacts-api-recipients/add-recipients
It doesn't appear to me to be anywhere in the docs, but I thought I'd ask in case I missed it.
Not as of the current date; I asked their support staff and received the following answer:
Double opt-in needs to be implemented by you in the form/page you're subscribing your recipients. The confirmation email can be sent through SendGrid.
For Marketing Campaigns we have the SendGrid’s WordPress Subscription Widget that makes it easy for people visiting your WordPress site to subscribe to your marketing emails;
or Building a SendGrid Subscription Widget.
I got this answer from their support. It turns out we have to implement it by ourselves.
The double opt-in functionality is not something SendGrid provides as
we expect our customers to handle any opt-in practices on their side.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
SendGrid will be GDPR compliant by May, 25, 2018. Please note that
SendGrid does not – and does not currently have plans to – use servers
or data centers in the European Union to process email. Thus, SendGrid
cannot restrict data to the EU. However, neither current EU law nor
the GDPR require this. Instead, what is required is that SendGrid must
provide "appropriate safeguards" for data that it hosts and processes
on its US servers (see Art 46 of the GDPR here). SendGrid offers a
Data Processing Addendum (DPA) to provide such adequate safeguards,
which includes provisions for when GDPR goes into effect.
More info on GDPR can be found here. Our DPA can be reviewed and
signed by filling out the information here.
They do not support it. I asked support many times, which is a strange as it would seem a company of that size could spare the dev resources to build a feature that literally all of their customers need.
However, https://sgwidget.com is a third party product that provides double opt in functionality for Sendgrid accounts.
Full Disclosure: I am a developer at SG Widget.
No, indeed still today, they do not. Not in their forms, nor in their API is there simple, flip-switchable support for double opt-in. But, with email automation fairly recently implemented in their marketing services ("free" and "advanced" plans, not "essential") you can send an automated email directly upon sign-up.
My solution is to have 2 lists for new contacts, where one is a "pre-confirmation" list and the other being the "real" list. Here´s a way to use automation:
Create initial signup form, either via their sparse Web forms or via your own, using HTML/JS/PHP and API endpoint:
Create 2 separate lists, one for "pre-confirmation" emails and the other for people who confirm their addresses.
Make the form sign up new contacts to the first list, "pre-confirmation".
Create a marketing automation flow that triggers upon new signups to the "pre-confirmation" list. Make the automation trigger an email that contains a button or a link with the following link structure:
https://yoursite.com?email=user#email.com&passphrase=[phrase-you-set-manually]
where ?email= is your user´s email, substitute this in the email template/design by {{ Sender_Email }}
where &passphrase= is a phrase long enough to not be guessed. Since you only have one single email design here, and you can only enter one single phrase, unless you make a script or a hash, you make it difficult enough for people to think it was generated by a server :).
On your server/application, yoursite.com, use $_POST['email'] and $_POST['passphrase'], or whatever you name them, to validate the email clicks from your list and then enter all validated emails to the correct list using the PUT
/marketing/contacts endpoint.
you may also have to delete the user from the previous list, using DELETE
/marketing/lists/{id}/contacts, but I do think that the PUT /marketing/contacts takes care of placing the contact in only the lists specified in the list_ids field.
once the contact has been entered into the correct list, you can also have a marketing automation set up for that list, which sends him/her a welcome message.
This method takes care of double opt-in for SendGrid without using one single email credit from the Email API (transactional plan). The only catch is that we utilize one initial and one second/final list to achieve it.
Note: the initial sign-up message that here acts as the "confirm your email" message, will be tied to the first list and will require a marketing unsubscribe link in the footer. Make it clear in the bottom of the email that it is a temporary list, to not get any spam complaints. But it will not be an issue, as we wont be sending to anyone in that list except for this initial time. Unless you have a user who enters his/her email twice, after some time of inactivity when they forgot they already signed up. That could happen. But it´s a separate issue.
I think this is possible by switching the flow of a typical email subscriber. When the user clicks your subscribe button, instead of calling the sendgrid members/contact PUT api to add to your list, send an email with a link to a URL of yours that will then trigger the members/contact PUT api call.
Not sure what stack you are using but I was able to build something like this with next.js utilizing their api routes
I'm using rails 2 for this app, with ActionMailer, but this is a general question about emails.
When we send out emails, i save a record corresponding to the email in a database table. I'd like to keep track of whether people have read the emails, and am wondering the best way to do it. On initial googling, it seems like i've stumbled into an ongoing battle between spammers and email clients!
My first thought was to use the "read receipt" header, but i know that this isn't supported by a lot of clients and is therefore unreliable. After that, i read of the tactic of including an image in the mail, and of detecting that image being loaded. I was thinking that i could put a parameter with the email record's id in the image url, so that when i get a request for that image i can see if it has a (for example) email_id param and if so, mark the corresponding email as having been read.
But, then i remembered that many clients are wise to this tactic and specifically ask the viewer of the mail if they want to display images. Obviously they might say no.
Am i right in thinking that i can't pull in other resources, such as stylesheets, in my mail? Because if i can pull them in, i could do that same trick but with the stylesheet rather than an image.
Grateful for any advice, max
Externally-hosted stylesheets are generally treated the same way as images. The client will not download them without prompting the user, if that works at all with HTML-formatted emails.
One thing to consider- you're looking to determine whether the email was read, not necessarily just received, right? Format your email so that it can't be easily read without viewing the images, and include a "view in browser" link at the top. Track image and page-format views and I think you'll have a fairly reliable way to measure actual reads.
Bit late on this, but we've got a similar problem.
We're tracking the links to our site that are included within the email. We're doing this by, like you, having a DB record per email sent out. We've generated a unique hash key per email and are including that as a parameter on all the links included in the email.
We simply then have a before_filter that looks for the parameter and records the fact against the correct email record by using the unique hash to identify the correct one.
We use a unique hash key (rather than the DB's primary key) just so it is a little bit more secure / reliable.
Obviously this method only helps us track the clicks our emails have generated (and not if they've been read) but it is still useful as we can see which of ours users has clicked on which links.
We are having major problems with this as well.
We have task wek portal, where users create tasks (like paint my house) and then we invite painters to give the task creator an price on painting his house.
For that we had a very advanced email system, that sends an invitation and if they accept the invitation we send them the contact info of the task creator.
We need to be able to track if the email was opened, and then once it's opened, we know that the company got the contact info, and we can now send another email to the task creator, telling them that they can expect to be contacted by that company.
The problem is that tracking if the email was opened is not reliable at all. There are different systems for this like msgtag (which does not support a wide range of mail clients like yahoo and other major clients) and our email API client (elastic email) even offer some API call back functions to tell us if each email was opened or bounced or whatever. But again, it's not reliable. To track if it's open, elastic email just includes a 1x1 px image and track if it's opened. So if people don't click "show images in this email" it's not tracked as opened.
So basically we are down to two options.
Have vital portions of the content printed on images, that they have to view to get the info we want to track if they got (in this case contact info)
Just have a link in the email "click here to get the contact info" and then track if that is clicked.
So in conclusion, the "track if opened" is totally useless and unreliable, unless you can fully control which email clients your recipients are using and how they are using them (like if they are all your employees or something).
We're looking for the best way to integrate dynamic content into emails sent by various individuals (or companies) using various mass mailing systems, some of them proprietary.
What are the options to do that and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
For example, I guess that one of the options is to add an iframe to the emails. In this case the url for the iframe content will carry a token which will identify the specific email, and our system will generate the iframe content.
Any advice on the subject is highly appreciated.
Most email readers won't allow you to input dynamic content into emails. Unfortunately there's no way round this other than asking the users to click a link to get to the content (something I've seen done before).
Almost all email clients nowadays do not even download images from remote locations unless explicitly told to do so, let alone displaying iframes. So your best bet will be to ask users to click some link.
I created a multi threaded email mailer that has to generate unique content for each user. Each thread is creating the body of the email. Each section in the email has reference links to the detail page of that record inside the system