Tracking email bounces, opens, clicks

Question

I found How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam? to (hopefully) be a solid guide to avoiding being marked as spam. Are there any other important tips/suggestions?

How do I track bounces,opens,clicks? These are features found in paid services like Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor.

Answer 1

Do the same as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor then. LIE about your stats.

There is no accurate way to track emails. If there was it'd just get blocked again. Most people don't want you to know these things and most email software ensures you don't. The stats provided by email tracking services are bogus.

Consider:

• Most spam services will detect image 'bugs' and flag you as spam.
• Image bugs don't do anything until the user clicks 'show images'. This does not mean they didn't open or read it without images. How can you tell if a mail service downloaded the image preemptively to cache it or check it for image spam?
• It can be difficult to determine the difference between a bounce and a reply due to differences in mail servers.

Only clicks can be tracked by redirecting through your server. Even then who can say that mail services won't start processing links in emails to determine whether the email is spam?

Answer 2

Opens can be tracked using a 1x1 picture file in an email. However, this is the same tactic that spammers use to validate email address existence, so you'll be fighting on the same side in that regard, unfortunately.

Clicks can be tracked by assigning a unique identifier to each link, determined by two variables: the URL that was clicked and the email address that clicked it. You can, for example, determine these on-send and store them in a database with the same unique identifier.

Bounces should bounce back to you with the email address intact.

Answer 3

I was looking at the email facebook sends out. In addition to an image, they use a bgsound element as a tracking bug like this:

<bgsound src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=99999999&s=a"
                  volume="-10000" />

I'm guessing the bgsound src is fetched by some readers when the images are off.

Answer 4

Check out Ask MailChimp: How do you track email opens?

Answer 5

if you really want to track bounces, use a service like Email Delivered (www.emaildelivered.com)

i also use Return Path (www.returnpath.com) for a really good reading on whats being delivered to the inbox vs spam box and what esp's are totally rejecting my mail.

Answer 6

Two ideas, clicking links, and statistical fudgery.

Clickthroughs

I would like to add that you can mark emails as read by a user clicking a "view this email online" or by tracking click-throughs. If a user clicks on any <a> tag in your email, send it to a script first that logs the email as read and marks which link they clicked on. This will give you can get a more accurate number.

Stats

I wonder if there is any research into how many users don't show images. That way you could 'statistically' correct for the lower open counts. Just did a bit of reading and found:

A 2009 report from Merkle states that only 48% of email recipients see images automatically. This means that if an email campaign relies heavily on images, it’s probably not being read by over half of its intended recipients. Source

The same site says:

In the latest MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report (2010), a survey of email recipients found that only 33% have images turned on by default.

Somewhere in between there could be a useful figure (35-40%) of users not displaying images in emails. That doesn't necessarily say that those users are opening the emails. Just that auto-displaying images isn't enabled.

If anyone can come up with some more facts/stats, we could potentially get a correction factor. Just with this information I don't think you can do much other than marketing smoke-and-mirrors. For example, 30% opened the emails. Based on 35% of users not displaying images, that means ~9% of users didn't display images, but explicitly chose to turn them on for this email (not really, but just go with it). Let's say that leaves 26% to unaccounted for. You could "correct" your 30% to 56%! All with the magic of bogus stats and a touch of marketing.