Track readers and click throughs down to contact level!

[techex]

Ability to track whether someone has opened your html email, by tracking pull downs of a 1x1 pixel image.... phpAdsNew has this feature.... just requires a combination of this with mailmerge... (Of course this relies of the 3rd party allowing html, this is however becoming pretty standard now days...)

Also extend the current ability to track clickthroughs down to an individual email level. so that we can see exactly which customer has clicked through...

I dont actually think this is just a Marketing issue - I think it should be in the normal emails as well.

Cheers

Rich

[sansbury]

I do a decent amount of mail campaigns and I have a lot of concerns these days about deliverability. I do 100% B2B stuff and I get "piss off" messages from mailservers at about 5% of my lists (and I go out of my way to make my mails personalized, relevant, and non-spammy, but I get the sense that IT departments would sooner bounce 20 reasonable sales mails than have on v1ag3a mail get though to the CEO. One spamfilter was nice enough to mail me a table indicating why it was kill-filing me and the fact that I had a URL with "remove" in its name was the #1 reason.

Now if 5% of servers are giving me affirmative kill messages, I can probably assume at least another 5-10% are trashing me and not telling me about it. Apply your own numbers here but in my case this is costing me real business.

My fear is that a lot of spamkillers look for tracking devices and trash the whole email. Simply using URLs with parameters will trip many filters set up by overzealous IT departments. I used to send my emails using Outlook mail merge, and since I switched to Sugar my response rates have actually gone down. I am considering not using tracking URLs for a while to see if this changes things.

[trueblade]

We install and manage Linux servers that filter a lot of email spam.

One of our servers handles email for many domains. RBL blocks are the strongest tool we use for filtering out unwanted email. After RBL checks, we run SpamAssasin and an anti-virus program.

Here is the data for what that server did in the 24 hours leading up to 4:00 AM this morning, July 11, 2005:

12995 messages checked and passed.
17833 messages checked and blocked.
402 virus infected messages were found.
12 messages with improper size found.
49 MIME unexpected end of header.
9 MIME part did not end with expected boundary.
115 whitelisted senders.
69 messages with bad headers were found.

Clearly there is a lot of bad email that needs to be filtered.

If you are sending out large amounts of unsolicited email, chances are good that many people are trying very hard to block your efforts. This contest will become more adversarial over time and the email filters will become more aggressive. Consider using regular mail or the phone instead.

If you are sending out email to a pure opt-in list and you want to increase the delivery rate, you need to reduce the quantity of items in your emails that will cause email filters to suspect your message is spam. 1 pixel images, too much HTML, etc., will tend to cause your email to be rejected. See this link for a full listing of tests performed by SpamAssassin:

http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_0_x.html

There are hundreds of tests performed.

We encourage all of our users not to use HTML email for a variety of reasons. I realize there are lots of people on the other side of the fence who want to send fancy email, etc. but our position is that email is an important communication system which shouldn't be burdened with sending unnecessary content such as HTML.

See this link for futher thoughts:

http://www.trueblade.com/knowledge.html#email-spam

--
Robert Burgoyne
True Blade Systems, Inc.
301-596-3555

[realopenit]

If you are sending out large amounts of unsolicited email, chances are good that many people are trying very hard to block your efforts. This contest will become more adversarial over time and the email filters will become more aggressive. Consider using regular mail or the phone instead.

Exactly. Sending emails out using lists and offer people the chance to opt-out is still spam. sorry. they never asked to be emailed, you're just being polite. It's still unwanted email though and thus spam.

According to (european?) anti-spam guidelines you should send out brochures and letters and ads and use your website or call center to collect Email addresses. These will then form your whitelist. All those persons will have opted-in themselves. If you send them a confirmation request after they've filled in your form, it's even a "double opt-in", to prevent others from signing up people "by acident". Only then may you mail them and expect Emails to get through.

However, more and more server are now blocking images on the server level. I manually block all images in my email clients, unless the sender's address is in my addressbook. and I never click on links but rather go to a site mentioned in the "ad".

So I hope you see life is getting more difficult for spammers and sadly also for legit marketing companies. But that is the way it has always been. Until internet offered a brief glimpse of a brave new world and everyone abused that. It only means that once again marketing companies must do work for acquiring opt-in mail addresses and everyone must pay $$$ to get them. however, if you resell any opt-in addresses, it's spam once again and the circle is complete.