Im curious how this is accomplished. Let's say a platform has a voting system on a webpage. A piece of content can be voted on positive or negative. As a user scrolls through the platform, they can see a live change in the amount of votes each piece of content has.
I figured this would be done one of two ways but I am not sure which is the most accepted one.
A timer to call the server ever x amount of seconds and update the components on a loop.
A socket to connect to the backend every time a user opens said page.
I wont know which is best, but I feel like 2 probably wins considering its a little less repetitive.
Through our platform I'm sending automatic emails with an unsubscribe link.
The unsubscribe has the following format:
http://example.com/unsubscribe?id={id}&c={code}
The Id represents the UserId in the database, the Code is just some hash that is linked to the User (so people can't unsubscribe random people).
Problem is that I'm getting exceptions that the UserId does not match the database (about 5-10%) - the Id is just way larger then the largest Id in our database.
Another weird thing is that the query parameters seem to be reversed. It is suddenly ?c={code}&id={id} instead of ?id={id}&c={code}.
The code is really really simple, and I can't believe there is anything that can go wrong in constructing the original message. In a way there don't seem to be any other code paths.
I can come up with two possible causes:
Some email tools mangle the url as some kind of anti spam / phishing / tracking / footprinting?
This is somehow related to character encoding going bad or something similar?
But in a way I have no clue and I'm really at a loss here. I really would like to fix this, because the last thing I want to do is spam people by accident that can't unsubscribe.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I work in a company where we sent many offer newsletters a week.
When the offer time has passed we replace some of the images of the newsletter so that it is clear the offer has ended.
Lets say that we have an image of the product and of course it has a link to our website. Apart from changing the image with the word "Ended" , is it possible to disable the link as well?
I know it might not sound possible, but wondering if there is way.
Thanks for your time.
I'm doing a small newsletter software for my business, and I'm wondering what metrics should I collect. Obviously, bounces and clicks should be tracked, but I'm wondering should I track email opens (via an image or a bgsound element)?
Do popular webmail services and ISPs check for tracking images and possibly increase my spam score? I guess if it increases the chances of ending up in a spam filter, I'd rather not collect that metric.
Thanks.
It's generally bad form to try to track your users in that way. Email opens are a private thing.
If you have an image with a unique URL per message, yes you can track it, but IMO, you really shouldn't. Including unnecessary images in an email is bad for a number of reasons:
Images can increase your spam score. There's a time and place for images. They can improve a message, but used inappropriately, they can look spammy.
It is obvious what you are doing. Sooner or later, one of your customers is likely to get wise to it. Some people won't care; others will feel violated.
It's REALLY unreliable. Most email clients and webmails feature an option to block images by default. You will get massively understated results.
Also remember, some people open an email immediately before they click the "delete" button. You are much better off tracking clicks.
There may be some merit in tracking the images you want to include anyway, but I'd not treat it as anything more than a very basic indicator.
As always it depends on the individual ISP and Webmail services. However, I can share some anecdotal evidence: I periodically use mailchimp to send out mass email notifications, and email opens are tracked in mailchimp using the same approach you mentioned (See following link for reference: http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-tracking). I never experienced any issues with ending up in the spam folder, I have only had challenges with bounce backs and ending up in the Gmail promotions tab.
So based on the fact that some companies are already doing this, I have to say it probably won't increase your spam score.
Most services offered online today that claim to "track" e-mails, do so by embedding images in the emails. My questions are:
Is this the only way to do it and if not, what are the other methods?
Are any of the methods actually fool-proof?
Has anybody had any luck with specific software or even an online group?
Yes, this is pretty much the only way to do it. Consider that an email is something that is inherently static. The only way to know if someone has "opened" an email is for the email to send some information back to your server. Most email clients these days support HTML emails, which means that you can get the client to request an image (or anything else) from your server by embedding the proper HTML tags. Other than this, you cannot force an email client to do anything it doesn't want to do. It's a separate program on a remote computer, and you have no control over it.
No, there's no foolproof way. There will always be emails you can't track. If someone downloads their email and disconnects from the internet before reading it, you can't track that email. Most email clients allow you to disable image loading now as well if you want to, so that can block tracking too.
I've usually written my own, so I wouldn't know what to recommend. I imagine most services will be quite similar, so I'd base a product/purchase decision on how easy their front-end is to use.
In addition to pixel tracking, a second way to track open rates is by looking for clickthroughs. If someone clicked through, then they must have opened it. This is infrequent, but it's important not to throw this data away.
More details:
How MailChimp tracks open rates
How CampaignMonitor tracks open rates
Wikipedia on email open rates
Hubspot on open rate issues
Facebook uses a bgsound element in addition to an img element like this:
<img src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=999999999999"
style="border:0;width:1px;height:1px;" />
<bgsound src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=99999999999&s=a"
volume="-10000" />
This is the best way, and it's hardly ideal - many e-mail clients block images to start with.
No, no methods are foolproof. A foolproof method of detecting if someone had read an e-mail would be a significant privacy issue.
I've used ExactTarget and CampaignMonitor's tracking systems. Both worked pretty well for tracking trends - i.e. twice as many people opened e-mail #1 than #2 - but you never know how many missed opens there are due to images not being shown.
Pixel tracking is the only way to track open rates. Then the links in your emails are also tracked through a redirect service for click rates. Absolutely nothing is going to be foolproof. You will have to use some guess work to figure out your actual open rate since some email clients will only take the text version and not the html and also some clients do not load images by default.
SilverPop is a popular one. They actually use PowerMTA on the back-end. Our company just ended up licensing PowerMTA and writing our own front-end and tracking.
No it's not the only way. Your HTML e-mail can refer to a web server for 'some content' which is then tracked. That could be an image, a stylesheet, some Javascript, etc. Most mail clients hate it and nothing automated is guaranteed to work.
Gain the trust of your recipient and invite them to your website. Track clicks.