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Okay so I wanted to make this blog post to get some info from the TL community...
(IF YOU WANT TO SKIP THE BORING STUFF GO TO THE BOLD POST AT THE VERY BOTTOM TO SEE WHAT I NEED!!!)
So for some quick background... I am a communications specialist for a large global technology company. Each month I send out a newsletter to about 120,000 internal employees (1/4 the size of the overall company). The newsletter is related to various tools that employees can access in an internal catalog.
So each month we track the newsletter on an article page provided internally. The e-mail we send out has links to the article as well as the translated versions. We have a tracker on the links so if someone clicks the link in the e-mail it will count as a "view."
The problem we're experiencing is that the people we are sending the newsletter to wanted more content in the e-mail instead of just the links to another page. So I had a graphic designer help me create this awesome looking newsletter just for the e-mail. It looks great and is quite vivid with respect to the imagery. Unfortunately most of the text is found within images (graphic designers, go figure..) and the client that the majority of our employees use is a program called Lotus Notes 8. This program unfortunately blocks images by default, so the email originally comes up as a bunch of red squares and x's. To remedy this we are looking to put all of the content in the newsletter onto the e-mail, but an issue arises... we can't track anything if we do this.
We want to know who is opening this particular e-mail so we have some metrics to capture regarding our monthly readership. This is important since our readership has declined from about 25,000 views monthly to about 7,500 views monthly between March and June of this year.
What I want to know is if there is a way we can embed something into the e-mail that will capture a view just by opening the page. This can be HTML as we are sending from a mass-mailer that is HTML-based. Sadly there is a preview option in the client as well, but we can ignore this fact for the moment.
If I'm not conveying my needs properly please let me know. I'm not a technical expert so if I need to rethink what I'm asking I can definitely (at the very least) do that for you.
Thanks!
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You can embed an image, which can actually be php script or w/e. Receiver has to allow images though, which all popular email clients block unless the user agrees to load them.
Edit: nvm, apparently just reading the bold part didn't suffice.
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On July 14 2010 00:35 disco wrote:
You can embed an image, which can actually be php script or w/e. Receiver has to allow images though, which all popular email clients block unless the user agrees to load them.
Edit: nvm, apparently just reading the bold part didn't suffice.
Yah I was doing some testing with image blocking today and there really is no other way aside from asking people to enable images (temporarily or permanently). I'm actually fighting with my graphic designer over this who believes it's "stupid to expect that people are unwilling to click an extra button each time they have to read an e-mail." If this wasn't an issue I was concerned with from the start then why would I have moved away from just posting links in an e-mail for people to read an article?
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On July 14 2010 03:32 Amber[LighT] wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2010 00:35 disco wrote:
You can embed an image, which can actually be php script or w/e. Receiver has to allow images though, which all popular email clients block unless the user agrees to load them.
Edit: nvm, apparently just reading the bold part didn't suffice. Yah I was doing some testing with image blocking today and there really is no other way aside from asking people to enable images (temporarily or permanently). I'm actually fighting with my graphic designer over this who believes it's "stupid to expect that people are unwilling to click an extra button each time they have to read an e-mail." If this wasn't an issue I was concerned with from the start then why would I have moved away from just posting links in an e-mail for people to read an article?
I don't think there's actually another way to check is the email is being read. Spammers would love that ofcourse.
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I swear everytime I open one of my alumni email newsletters my school calls me for donations. I've blocked them since.
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You can embed some html from somewhere else (ie your server). Then count how many times this html has been loaded. But there are two problems. If the embeded html is on a local server, it won't work when users are not at office. The other problem is that everytime the email is opened, it will be counted again.
And the best practice is not to put text in pictures.
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omg lotus notes -___- oh god oh god oh god, worst program in the universe, there are sites dedicated to proving lotus notes is a terrible program.
Anyways, hate aside, there's no way to check whether a strictly email newsletter is being read i.e. I read email sent by you on a not horrible email client, your web server's counter goes up after I open the email. There might be some hacks to do it, every time your email is open a script prompts the client to send something back to your server, don't know how legal having clients send secret information is though.
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On July 14 2010 11:30 Count9 wrote:
omg lotus notes -___- oh god oh god oh god, worst program in the universe, there are sites dedicated to proving lotus notes is a terrible program.
Anyways, hate aside, there's no way to check whether a strictly email newsletter is being read i.e. I read email sent by you on a not horrible email client, your web server's counter goes up after I open the email. There might be some hacks to do it, every time your email is open a script prompts the client to send something back to your server, don't know how legal having clients send secret information is though.
Lol my company developed Lotus Notes. I hate about 75% of the Lotus products but the people who develop them are really great people 
It isn't an issue of legality since the people who we are receiving this are part of an opt-in community anyway. We can stay under the radar fairly easily and a lot of people will probably never even notice. I'm going to work on something to embed into the HTML.
I'm just wondering if it will still exist even if someone opens it up in Notes since the e-mail client breaks all e-mail standards that have been in place for ... oh IDK 10+ years or so.
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EPT
