Inspiring

Question

CF - Tracking emails.

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
January 5, 2010
3 replies
3226 views

Folks,

Can anyone share some thoughts / info (or) best practices to acheive email tracking through ColdFusion?.

Thanks in advance!.

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

How about doing <img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/trackemail.cfm?id=1234" heigt="1" width="1">

Would this get blocked by ISPs? It worked when I sent it to myself (yahoo mail), but I never tried sending out mass emails with this tracking code.

ilssac

Inspiring

There are tools that will recognize that trick and block it.

So yes, it could be blocked by some percentage of users who received it.

Such as myself. My e-mail is configured to block all images in any email by default. I can reverse this on a message by message basis, but I only do that when I want to.

J

joecopley

Inspiring

As the previous poster mentioned, if the email is in HTML and references an object on your server, then your web logs will indicate how many received the message. It doesn't have to be an image, it could be a style sheet, although the reference must be keyed somehow to the particular message. But in any case your CF app will have to inspect the logs and count the number of times the referenced object was requested.

This is how Constant Contact and PatronMail do it, I think. But it will never be foolproof; if the recipient chooses not to download the referenced object, it doesn't work. Some ISPs and filters scrub these out automatically as well.

I have a client that encodes the links in the emails with a tracking variable that is then inspected in the application.cfm template. If the variable is present, then a tracking database is updated. This allows the client not only to track how many times the link was clicked, but even who clicked it. But it isn't a view counter.

Joe

Y

yui8979

Inspiring

Just a note.

I've seen some companies send out promotional e-mails containing nothing but

1 huge image as the promotional content - so to find out what it is about,

the receiver is forced to download the embedded image to find out more (ie

!http://bleh.com/promotionA.gif!) and with that your webserver

would have logged a successful 'hit' via the hotlinking of the image if the

mail client loaded the image. They usually also provide a link for the

receiver to click on - typically for more information, or if they cannot

view this e-mail.

While that isolates all your readers who can't be bothered with non-text

friendly e-mails, but on the other hand helps you to keep a pretty good

count of who has viewed this promotional content, and count the number of

people who followed the link.

yui

-

-__cfSearching__-

Inspiring

allows the client not only to track how many times the link
was clicked, but even who clicked it

As unpopular a view-point as this might be, I think this kind of tracking without telling people seems a bit smarmy. At least websites have privacy policies posted. They are not worth much .. but at least people are made aware of the policies Yes, yes, many companies use this kind of hidden tracking every day. But it is still seems a little smarmy.

ilssac

Inspiring

Define "Track email through ColdFusion"

ColdFusion is not a e-mail server so it has little to do with e-mail or tracking thereof, other then the ability to initiate an e-mail message to an e-mail server.

D

DavermsAuthor

Inspiring

:-) Sure Ian.. Let me explain it..

We have a "Email Manager" application, which can send out email campaigns to the customers. And we need to show an inventory (for the Administrator) which should consist,

i) No of emails sent out

ii) No of emails delivered successfully.

iii) No of emails viewed. (is where I need this "tracking")

and so on....

I need your (and others) input / suggestions on requirement #3.

D

Dan_Bracuk

Inspiring

For number of emails successfully delivered, the best you can do is use cfmail's failto attribute, and cfpop to track delivery failure notifications. Once the mail has been sent, it's no longer under your control. It could get filtered by the ISP's spam filter and you'll never know.

For number of emails viewed, you have no way of knowing. The best you can do is ask for some recipient feedback in the email and count that.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded