While I haven't actually used it, an email analytics web app called Litmus claims to be able to track:
How long someone takes to read an email.
Whether it is forwarded.
Whether it is deleted.
Whether it is printed.
What email client was used to read it.
I'm curious about where it gets this information from. Most email clients i've seen don't even load external images without explicitly loading them, let alone javascript.
Even if a lot just support images, that wouldn't give away items 1-3.
Here's my best guess. As this link rockinthesixstring posted says, it relies on images but not javascript.
How long someone takes to read an email.
Place several images in the email that take a while to load, if the email is read for a long time, more are loaded.
Whether it is forwarded.
Is the image loaded from more than one IP/user agent?
Whether it is deleted.
The screenshots show this combined with glanced.
Whether it is printed.
Add a background image bug to a print stylesheet.
What email client was used to read it.
Check the user agent.
Any email analytics application I've seen use an image tracker. Basically if you attach a code generated 1x1 px image somewhere in the email, then during the loading of that image on the server side, you capture all of the ServerVariables
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms524602%28VS.90%29.aspx
EDIT:
I just read some of the information on the Litmus website an it looks as though it confirms what I wrote above regarding image tracking
Related
I am guessing there is no support for this, but need to confirm for a client.
I am using send_flow from the API. Is it possible to:
In any way add recipients to an existing Email Collector? The reason is that automating surveys creates quite a few collectors if done daily or more frequently.
Is it possible to send in HTML in email_message.body_text programmatically? It does state plain text in the documentation, and it does not get converted and shows up in the email as plain text. If I use the same HTML-code in an Email Collector created in the SurveyMonkey-website, it works fine, but then again I have no way of using an existing collector it seems, as in question 1.
Continuing from question 2, if we can't send in HTML programmatically, is there a way to change the default email template? The API states "Default template is used if this [body_text] is not specified", but I can't see any option of customizing this in our client-accounts.
Have also considered using a Web Link Collector and send emails outside of SurveyMonkey. The challenge with that seems to be:
Can't register [CustomData] with the responses, which is vital for the analysis, without adding potentially large dropdowns inside the survey itself.
The Survey URL is not unique in terms of forwarding it, although this can be an acceptable risk.
Thanks a lot, any ideas or feedback is appreciated.
Thanks to Tony at SurveyMonkey this was solved by him pointing to Custom Variables in the Platinum version, then adding these to a Web Link Collector and sending the HTML email from our integrating application.
http://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/What-are-custom-variables-and-how-do-I-use-them
The problem with web link collector is that there is no way to track response rate since SurveyMonkey doesn't know how many links were sent out. I don't know a way around this.
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).
I have a web site with various graphs embedded in it that are generated externally. Occasionally those graphs will fail to generate and I would like to catch that when it happens. These graphs are embedded in multiple pages and I would rather not check each page manually. Is there any kind of tool or perhaps a browser addon that could periodically take screenshots of different URLs and email them in a single email? It would be sufficient to have scaled-down screenshots of full pages emailed maybe once a day to me, allowing me to take a quick glance and see that all the graphs are there and look okay.
I'm a big fan of automation. Rather than have emails generated that you then have to look at, take a look at 'replacing custom missing images in jquery'. This will run a piece of Javascript for each image that fails. Extending that to make a request to a URL that you control, which may also include the broken URL (or just the filename that is broken) would not be too hard. That URL would then generate an email, and store the broken URL so that it doesn't send 5000 emails if there's a flurry of hits to your page.
Another idea building on the above is to effectively change the external 404 from the source site to a local one (eg /backend/missing-images/) - the full-path need not exist - you are just generating a local 404 record in your apache logs. Logwatch will send a list of 404 pages from the apache log to you daily (or more often, if you want) by email.
I am using a salesforce workflow to send out product information and invoices to clients but I am running into problems thinking of how to verify if a client receives the email and or opens it. Is there any way to prove that a client received my inventory list or invoice? Doing some prior research on this subject I have come across the following suggestions:
Adding a 1x1 invisible image to the email with a unique id
Adding a regular image instead of a 1x1, maybe company logo
Having the recipient click a link to see the invoice
With all these solutions, you have to detect image requests or link request for them and extract/produce a unique id for each client. I am not really sure how to do this in salesforce so any help would be appreciated, along with other detection ideas.
If you have Salesforce Content, there are some ways to expose documents to clients with the features you need. Basically you'll send an email with link and later you can track confirmation of opening, count how many times was it downloaded.. You can also set the expiration date to the document (can't be downloaded anymore after the date).
As for "pure" email from Apex/Visualforce and basically manually recreating the Content's functionality... nowadays most mail clients block external pictures unless explicitly allowed by the mail recipient, so I suspect you'll have poor track of emails marked as opened. Probably you could create a small Visualforce page (no header, no styles, just controller that makes update "invoice viewed" in the database). Display image from Documents on this page (make sure it's "externally available image") or even just display 1 pixel encoded in base64...
So, 'Litmus', a web app for testing emails and webpages across browsers and email clients, has a proprietary method that they claim is able to track not just opens, clicks, browsers, etc (standard with an embedded image and pass-through link tracking.)
What's unique is they claim that they are able to track what actions the end user took, how long the end user read it for, and if they deleted or forwarded the email. They claim they do this without JavaScript, and purely using embedded images. They claim that the method works across most major email clients.
What could they be doing to track this? Obviously, if they're doing it with third party applications that they don't control, whatever they are doing should be replicable.
I'm thinking that they realized that when an email client forwards or deletes an email, it 'opens' the email in a different way then normal, creating a unique user string on the server log of some kind? I'm grasping at strings, though.
http://litmusapp.com/email-analytics
Details here http://litmusapp.com/help/analytics/how-it-works
EDIT: It also looks like they track Prints. Maybe they do this by tracking calls to the 'print' css?
It's all done with good ol' image bugs. Breaking down how they find out...
Which client was used: Check the user-agent
Whether an email was forwarded: Done by attaching image bugs to divs that are loaded only when the message is forwarded.
Whether an email was printed: bug attached to print stylesheet
How long it takes to read an email: A connection that's kept open, as pointed out by Forrest (this is also how Facebook tracks(ed?) whether or not you are online on chat).
Whether an email was deleted: Check If a message was read for a short period of time or not opened. In fact, they group "glanced" and "deleted" together.
Of course none of this will work if email clients disable images in emails.
EDIT: Here's another question on this:
The OP actually has their tracking code, and this answer here explains how it works.
One way I can think of doing that is having an embedded image that loads from a script on a server. The script would not return anything or maybe send data really slowly to keep the connection open. Once the email is deleted the connection would be closed. This way they could know how long the email was open. Maybe they just assume if it's open for less than 10 seconds it was deleted?
Another way is tracking the referrer - this would give a lot of data on what a webmail client is doing, but I doubt it would be useful with a desktop client.
They know when the email is opened (it's when the image is called from their http server).
They also know what the user do and when since they can easily replace all links with their own tracking URLs redirecting to the original link.
There is nothing exceptional here. They are just a bit more advanced than their compatitors. There is no magic.
I have only one doubt: how they track delete. Technically, there is no way to know what happened to the message after it was read.
I suspect that a "deleted" mail is a mail that is never opened.