Mass email tracking

问题:

Most services offered online today that claim to "track" e-mails, do so by embedding images in the emails. My questions are:

1. Is this the only way to do it and if not, what are the other methods?
2. Are any of the methods actually fool-proof?
3. Has anybody had any luck with specific software or even an online group?

回答1:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

回答2:

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

回答3:

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" />

回答4:

1. This is the best way, and it's hardly ideal - many e-mail clients block images to start with.
2. No, no methods are foolproof. A foolproof method of detecting if someone had read an e-mail would be a significant privacy issue.
3. 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.

回答5:

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.

回答6:

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.