NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> html email
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> html email
Bernhard A. M. Seefeld (seefeld_at_relog.ch)
Tue, 6 Jan 1998 14:07:53 +0100
Hi Chris
>I was hoping that someone could provide me some background technical
>information on how subscription based HTML email works. Specifically, what
>the sender knows about when the email is received/opened and how they get
this
>info. How are the banner ads served and tracked?
Not received (= no opportunity to open in desirable form):
- When the address doesn't exist (anymore), the mail usually bounces.
- Orphan Accounts. Those accounts usually accumulate mail until the system
administrator notices and then forwards or deletes the mails and removes the
account.
A sophisticated system could try to identify such accounts (never opened for
a long period, suddenly bounces) and correct past audits.
- The User doesn't have a HTML capable Mailreader, finds garbage and
deletes the mail.
Opened
A simple and straightforward method for auditing opened mails is including
references to one or more images (i.e. IMG tags), which will be loaded
from - and can be audited at - a webserver, but only as long as the user
- is actually reading the mail in a HTML capable Mailreader
- is online while he reads the mail (homeusers often aren't!)
- has not turned images off
If you flag one of the images as not cachable, you will actually be able to
measure every instant, when the message was opened (and the above conditions
are true). Use the smallest image in your mail for this purpose. If you
don't have any small images, use a transparent 1x1 Pixel gif.
With this method you are able to measure archiving trends for your mailing
list, i.e. wether users keep the mails AND reread them after a while. You
can also identify popular mails! Just encode a mailingid into the auditing
gifs' url. Also encode a userid to do this on a user-by-user level!
Even more interesting possibilites emerge when you set cookies with the
auditing gif:
- If the user uses his browser as mail client then you will be able to
identify the user when he (re)visits the site, where the auditing gif was
originally retrieved from. Measure the marketing effectivity of your
mailinglist additionally to actual clicks on links in the mail!
- Identify forwarded mails! When a subscriber forwards a mail to a friend
he will trigger a request to the same gif (with the same encoded message and
userid!), but without the same Cookie. Observe how your mails wander through
the net and measure the impact on your traffic!
Before anyone cries: None of the above methods reveals any email addresses
to spammers/...! At most it will help spammers verify addresses. OTOH, for
this to work, they'd have to send every message one-by-one and not en bulk
through a relay host as they do it now.
BTW: Most of the above is also true for HTML newsgroup postings (Measure the
reach and effect on traffic of your postings!).
Conclusion: There are methods to measure the number of not received and the
number of opened mails. But there is a gap between "not received" and
"opened" where you can't tell wether the mail was "not received", "received
but never opened" or "opened".
Regards,
Bernhard
--------------------------------------------------------------
Bernhard A. M. Seefeld, mailto:seefeld_at_relog.ch
Relog AG, Z¸rich, Switzerland, http://www.relog.ch/
Consulting, Site- and Eventmarketing, Traffic Analysis, and more
Have a look at http://search.ch/ , Switzerland's favorite Searchengine!
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