I was working on a newsletter system, it's done now and it works fine. Today I was talking with a client about an upgrade for the system that does the following ->
"Automatic link tracking: View who
opened your email and what links they
clicked on."
Now, I have an idea on how to do this to add #id variable from the user query string on each link and then add a counter on each site to see who opened the link. BUT, is it possible to do this somehow else (without the counter on each link)? And how is it possible to track who opened your mail??? I saw a couple of newsletter system websites that say they can allegedly do this...
Thank you for your time!
The only way to track who opens your emails that I can think of is to use the query string trick with the images embedded in your email. This approach is obviously fragile since viewing of inline images can be turned of in most email clients.
As was mentioned; it is not possible to track everyone who opened the email. But you can track who clicked on a specific link. The method you mentioned with the #id variable will work - but instead of embedding the actual ID in the link, I would recommend encrypting that data and not sending the actual user id in the email.
To get the users who actually opened the newsletter, you can insert a 1x1 pixel image into the email as hidden content. That pixel would come from www.myserver.com/tracker.gif?foo=bar.
Then you would look at your web server log or log this request in a database so that you can track the ones who really opened the newsletter.
Related
I want to embed an iframe inside an email that contains the 10 most recent chat messages. Is there a way to make this iframe dynamic so that it always shows the latest 10 chats regardless of when the email is opened? If the iframe is not the correct way to do this, is there a better way?
You can implement an iframe into the email - but your mail will be recognized as spam by many providers.
You should try to render your content dynamically into an image and implement that image into the email.
There kind of is a solution. It is using Dynamic CSS with a fallback of a Dynamic image to pull the information. It is not elegant really as for some clients (e.g. Outlook) this is not available at all and will only display initial information. It also utilizes a link for a style sheet which also severely limits which clients this will work in.
The fall back dynamic image is a bit more comprehensive in client support, but much harder to maintain as you will need to build something that programatically pulls the tweets (HTML webpage potentially) and then also have something that creates and hosts an image for the email to pull. This is not a short, simple thing to set up and may not be worth the required back end work for a simple email.
See this link for a bit more in-depth info on how this can be done for adding a live twitter feed into an email: https://litmus.com/blog/how-to-code-a-live-dynamic-twitter-feed-in-html-email
Since there was no accepted answer i thought i would give my input as well.
Litmus had done something similar for their live twitter feed in emails sometime ago.
The method i can think off is to create a PHP page which takes 10 images and makes it into 1. PHP can have a loop that checks for increments from a specific number and if it exists then add to that 1 image. When there is a new chat image added, PHP will disregard the last one and add the new in the loop.
For anyone reading this in 2022, this is possible with AMP.
Instead of an iframe, you can create a dynamic email easily.
check out amp.dev
Note: AMP is not supported by many email clients
All the email providers are placing zero pixel images at the end of the content for tracking opens. Is there any particular reason? For example:
<img src = "http://tracksamle.com/ssss/track.gif" width="0" height="0">
Someone may be able to explain to larger detail, but I'm guessing it is forcing the email client to fetch the image from said address (which I would guess is unique such that it can be cross linked to the intended receiver of the email).
By then, on server, you can determine if the email has indeed been opened, and the IP-address of the opening party.
How this interferes with spam filters and other in-transit email scanners, I do not know though.
Edit:
As #bartdude also mentions in comments, positioning at end imposes least inconvenience on load times for the reader, as by then rest of the email should already be loaded, albeit this depends on implementation of loading process.
Adding to the answer above, note that if someone opens an email and has the option to "load images" and they don't click the link to load them, it will not count as an open. This is true also for text only emails. So if someone is tracking opens, they will never be accurate because of this.
I'm hearing a lot about "open time personalization" for emails, and I'm having trouble finding an explanation of how the technology actually works. The only part of an email I can think of that would be possible to change at open time would be image content. It could go like this:
Embed some details about the recipient or other info in a query string on the image
The user opens the email, requests the image, and the server decides what to send back based on the query string, time of day, weather, product stock levels, etc.
But, I'm seeing references that seem to point to more elaborate customization (changing which product is featured for example). How could it be possible to change the text of an email at open time? Am I missing something here or is it just fancy image swapping? How could this work with Gmail's image caching?
Is there a way to send some a url (or other thing) to a site such that data in a form is already filled out? This is not to my own site that I control.
For example, I want to send a link to some airline flights and want to have the destination and date be automatically filled out when the link is opened.
I'm guessing not, but have gotten lucky here before :) Maybe with some kind of program or add-on or??
If its written with GET method so just try to play with the site and just put the url with all the args you found.
If it is POST, so you need to create an add-on or pretend to a browser, search the net for this kind of solution.
No, that's not possible, if the remote site is not ready for that.
I need a way to transfer a bunch of information (1-10kb) from an email in the Mail application to my iPhone app.
I was thinking I could craft a custom URL in the body of the email that, when clicked, would transfer the information through a custom URL handler to my app.
However, it's a lot of data. Can I pass that much data in the custom URL handler? e.g. myapp://load?var1=[lotsofdata]&var2=[lotsofdata]
Or, is there some better way I can transfer info from the Mail app to my app?
I don't know what the maximum length is, but I do know that you can have very long data-urls in Safari, which let you store image or other file data in the url itself. If the limits are similar, then you are in luck.
The usual limit for a GET should not be longer than 2083 characters to be on the safe side.
But also it should be a method to read the email directly from your own app, but I'm not very familiar with this solution.
Instead of a link in the email, you could probably just create a form that posts the information instead of sending a get request to your site; that would get around your length limitation (if there is one)
That last answer assumes you have a site to put the data on. If you're trying to keep things purely in email it would be nice to stick the data in the mail message. You can embed images in an email anyway, so why not?
Doing some research, I came across two blog posts that claim to have created large URLs that have worked, although one is using the data: URL scheme and the other is using mailto: .
Your best bet is to probably just try it out: Create a link using myapp:// with a large amount of data, stick it in an email and see if your app reads the entire thing.