Tracking Newsletter Visitors

What steps must one take to implement

[Skylo]

Hi everyone,

As part of a new marketing drive by my company, we are for the first time sending out a newsletter to our visitors. This is something both myself and my company have never pursued. We have a talented designer and overall i think we have made a good start.

What is boggling me is how one would uniquely identify these visitors who have come from the newsletter. I beleive that they would come onto our site with a no referer reference.
Should i stick some kind of parameter in every url that is in the newsletter?

How do you identify Newsletter visitors and what has worked for you in the past?

[larryn]

Skylo,

By uniquely identify, I take it that you want to find out which newletter recipient clicked on a link in the newletter.

Commercial services us a redirector so that they can capture unique emails and measure how many referrals they make to a site, as you are sending the newsletter directly you can use these same techniques yourself.

The common way to uniquely identify someone is to append their email or some code to the url in each individually generated email. So for instance an copy of the newsletter sent to me would have links like this:

sompageinmysite?id=larryn 

or with a unique code

somepageinmysite?id=12d4321934 

Either of these methods would require a script or application to uniquely encode the links for each user.

If you only want to track how many people clicked on links in the newsletter, but without uniquely identifying them, just a simple landing page or query field should do the trick.

Of course, you web analytics application would need to be configured to give you the information you want from these pages.

Finally, if you were going to track referrals from your newsletter, I'd also suggest either a landing page unique to the newsletter or another query field so that you can track not only the user, but the newsletter issue.

Larry

[Eltiti]

What Larry writes is absolutely correct, so I have nothing to add there.

But at some point you may also be interested in the "open rate" of your messages (in addition to the click-through).

In that case you should know that (AFAIK) you can only get the open rate if you use HTML mail, not if you use plain text.

The "trick" is to embed a small (e.g., 1x1) picture in your message, and track how often it is loaded from your server.

I suppose you could also track which individual user open your message, by appending a parameter to the picture as well (src="htxp://mysite.com/myimg.gif?id=1234"), but that may raise a few privacy issues...

[Skylo]

Thanks guys, that is a massive help. Will return if i have any more trouble.

Thanks again and have a great weekend...