How to tell if they opened that email you sent March 19
Email newsletters are a great way to connect with your site visitors, whether to tell them about new offers or remind them of existing features. If the emails aren’t getting opened though, then its a total waste.
So how to tell?
Ideally, you don’t want anything too intrusive or that causes the user to get defensive and block you finding out. Lets check out a few options.
Return Receipts
This is the most common method. It comes built in to almost all email clients, but is very ‘in your face’. Whenever someone requests a return receipt I get a big message ‘This user has requested a return receipt. Allow Yes/No’. I always click ‘No’, and that is the end of that.
Requesting an Image
This method is only slightly more reliable, but a lot sneakier. When you send the email, make sure it is in HTML format and include an image tag that looks like this:
<img src='http://yoursite.com/UserOpenedEmail.aspx?UID=gathadams@gmail.com'>
What you are doing here is displaying an image, but actually requesting a page (UserOpenedEmail.aspx). You are also passing along the email address of the person - this should be the same address that the email was sent to.
When the website yoursite.com gets the page request for UserOpenedEmail.aspx it extracts the email address from the querystring and saves it - indicating that the email sent to that address was opened. The page must then return an image, otherwise the ‘image not found’ red cross will be shown.
So this method is great, right? As soon as the email is opened, or even displayed in the preview pane, then the website is alerted. Well, there are a few problems. The biggest is that all the newest email clients now default to not automatically downloading images. Or the email client could be text only. Less likely these days is the problem of not being connected to the internet when the email is read. Another big problem is that this method seems very underhanded - if your subscribers find you doing it, it is almost guaranteed that they ain’t gonna like it.
Get them back to the site
This method borrows a bit from the previous one, but gets rid of the sneakiness. When you send out the email to your subscriber, include a link to view the text on the website (or download as a pdf). In that link, add their user id. eg:
http://yoursite.com/newsletter.aspx?date=01012007&UID=gathadams@gmail.com
When the user clicks on the link they are taken to the site to read the newsletter. At the same time, you record the email address, indicating that they have opened the email. This method might require to to provide a snippet or teaser of the article to get people interested.
Of course, if you want to make it a little less obvious you are tracking the user then you can store the email addresses in a database & assign a number in place of it.
UID=123
looks less worrying than
UID=gathadams@gmail.com
Of course, don’t spam.