TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS [4335]

Last post 10-05-2009, 11:53 AM by Anonymous. 15 replies.
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  •  09-19-2008, 12:28 PM 9646

    TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS [4335]

    First, I have been engaged in the non-profit industry for many years and a life member of many groups. One of the issues for members is a lack of communication or lost membership dues. The service Wild Apricot avails to membership organizations is by far the best I have seen and I speak with authority. I have a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Electronic Commerce, thanks Wild Apricot for forming this service that is in great demand. Now, back to the issue at hand. It would be great to have a means to track the status of email blasts. In particular those that sit in the que or are bounced. If the system incorporated an option to view all emails read or bounced, this gives the membership organization a bird's eye view of those members not reached and decide on an alternative means to connect with members. The value in this tool supports many factors, such as renewal dues become timely, time is saved and most importantly the member is proud to serve with the organization, because the communication is sound.

    Thank you,

    Albert R. Renteria, civpol-alumni.org, business manager

  •  09-19-2008, 1:08 PM 9649 in reply to 9646

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Thank you Albert. This suggestion makes good sense and I hope to see more feedback from other clients.

    In particular:

    - Would you like the system to automatically flag members with a certain number of bounces (say, 5) to stop sending email to them?

    - tracking email opens is very unreliable. The way it usually works is an  invisible small image is inserted into email and when email is opened, that image is retrieved from the server - this fact is recorded in the logs. However many modern email programs block such images.

    - Do you consider important to track link clicks? here is how it works:
    -- you insert a link into your email like "www.abc.org/article123"
    -- when email is sent, all links are converted to something like "www.trackingserver.com/linkXYZ". When people click on this link, tracking server records this fact and redirects to the original link

    P.S. I have deleted your email from this post to avoid it being picked up by spambots.


    Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
  •  09-19-2008, 2:35 PM 9651 in reply to 9649

    • gypse is not online. Last active: 02-08-2012, 8:28 PM gypse
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    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Personally, I think getting a bounced mail notice the first time an email address bounces would be really helpful.  Why wait till they miss 5 messages.  Normally when an email bounces it is because the addy is no good any longer.  We can normally do some research and/or contact the person to get a new email addy amd resend the missed message.

    For when we can not get a good email addy, a "flag field" that we can check saying that this email addy bounces and don't send emails to it any more would be good.  That way the program could just skip those emails when sending out notices and when the person signs in they could be notified that they are not getting emails due to the fact that their email addy is no good.  That would stop emails bouncing and no notices would get sent to the administrator for that addy any more.

  •  09-22-2008, 3:56 PM 9669 in reply to 9649

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

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    We are still evaluating W.A. at this point and this is one of the sticking points for us. The goal is to reduce the amount of busywork that admins do. Managing bouncebacks as a courtesy for our members takes too much time.

     

    Per your questions:

     

    >> Would you like the system to automatically flag members with a certain number of bounces (say, 5) to stop sending email to them?

     

    Yes, that would be helpful.

    Also knowing if it is a hard or soft bounce would help. If it soft bounces, then it might be redelivered automatically, for example when the user's emailbox is full. If it is a hard bounce, permanently undeliverable, we know we have to respond because the user will never get the email. Not sure how easy it is for you to tell the difference. ConstantContact categorizes bouncebacks in this way somehow.

     

    In addition, for paying members, we contact them via phone if their email bounces the first time, so it would be nice if we were able to flag issues with members of a certain category.

     

    >> Do you consider important to track link clicks? here is how it works:

    -- you insert a link into your email like "www.abc.org/article123"

    -- when email is sent, all links are converted to something like "www.trackingserver.com/linkXYZ". When people click on this link, tracking server records this fact and redirects to the original link

     

    It would be useful to be able to track campaigns in this way. We post on a few lists and would like to know which lists are working better than others. And it would be nice to offer discount codes in certain situations.

     

    More on the subject of Bouncebacks:

     

    It’s cumbersome to have to click into an attachment for each and every bounceback. While integration with an email service provider would be ideal (even at extra cost), some minimal help in dealing with bouncebacks is key for us.

     

    A step in the right direction would be the ability to specify a different email address to receive bouncebacks (mentioned in another post, I think.)

     

    In following up on bouncebacks, we have come up against issues involving Email contact list preview & customization:

     

    Currently if you do an advanced search you get a list of members, which is great, but you must email all or none of them. We really need the ability to uncheck some. And to preview them just to do a reality check that it’s the right list.

     

    In addition, currently you can encounter situations in which the email function will report “we are sending out 14 of 15 contacts” – but it won’t display which ones are not being sent.

     

    Sorry for the long post!

     

  •  09-23-2008, 9:53 AM 9680 in reply to 9669

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Thanks, we really appreciate the details.

    Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
  •  10-24-2008, 12:28 AM 9999 in reply to 9680

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    I suspect the primary interest is to appreciate what percentage of emails were actually delivered. Example, a bad email can be processed, but we would get a faliure delivery, so those are easily attended to; however, if we send out 2,000 emails to our members, we have no clue if they were blocked or mail box was full, or other reasons for emails not being delivered. Some reasons for bouncing might look like the below:

  • User unknown or recipient mail configuration error
  • Bad domain (mail host does not exist)
  • Connection problem with mail host
  • Filtered, most likely by a content-based spam filter (check your edition content for spam-ish keywords)
  • Mailbox full, or other temporary warning that the message couldn't be delivered.
  • None - An unknown or no reason given for bounce
  • Essentially, if we use the clikc method you mention, we can track activity and we can monitor whch topics are most read by our members. So tracking with the link method is a great solution. As you noted, a server can block knowledge that an email was received, but if the user clicks, we can note the activity.

     I would be interested to learn of other thoughts on how best to track the interest of our members. Thanks,

     Albert R. Renteria, civpol-alumni.org, Business Manager

  •  11-06-2008, 10:52 AM 10119 in reply to 9649

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    I also think tracking bounced e-mails is a great idea.  I'm not sure if tracking opened links is of great importance, but knowing if an e-mail bounced is really important.  Many members simply forget to tell us they moved or changed e-mail accounts and we use e-mail blast results as a way to monitor this.  This would be a really good addition that I think should be brought into the pipeline of changes to do
  •  11-12-2008, 1:23 PM 10215 in reply to 9646

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Moved from wishlist to roadmap.

    Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
  •  01-18-2009, 7:23 PM 10942 in reply to 10215

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    So does this mean soon WA will notify site administrators of bounced emails or does it already do that?  We aren't up and running yet and this was one of my questions.

    Thanks!

    Stacey 

  •  01-19-2009, 7:53 AM 10947 in reply to 10942

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    WA already sends back bounced email notices. What we plan to add in the future is more user friendly / more automated way to deal with bounces.

    Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
  •  06-12-2009, 6:59 PM 13062 in reply to 9646

    • ad17 is not online. Last active: 03-15-2010, 4:32 PM ad17
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    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS [4335]

    I think we need email tracking.... Great idea.  This would keep us from going to outside sources for mail handeling
  •  06-24-2009, 1:04 PM 13264 in reply to 9646

    • jkellam is not online. Last active: 06-24-2009, 4:55 PM jkellam
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    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS [4335]

    This is a great suggestion and of huge importance to my organization. We are looking very closely at Wild Apricot as a solution for many of our needs. While this is not a huge sticking point, it is still very important to us to be able to track when emails are opened, when they bounce, and what links within an email are actually clicked on.

     It would also be nice to not have to go to an outside e-newsletter builder for this service.

     Thank you for providing this feedback forum!

    Jana Kellam

    Project Access, Buncombe County Medical Society

  •  07-30-2009, 6:55 PM 13723 in reply to 9649

    • savvy1 is not online. Last active: 02-07-2012, 11:34 AM savvy1
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    • Posts 17

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Hi Dmitry,

    We also feel this feature is very important to our clients.  (We are web designers using your platform.)  Bounce notification is the most important.  Hard vs soft notice would be very nice.  First bounce is the most critical.  Having a bounce section on dashboard would also be helpful to flag those which have bounced within a specified period of time. Perhaps the last 30 days.

    This is very important and time sensitive for Events.   Somebody could sign-up for an event and have a typo in their email address. They would not receive the confirmations or other event details. Unfortunately emailed bounce notices may easily get lost among the daily email clutter, even if the sender of bounce notices is white-listed.

    On a related point.  Have you considered requiring those who sign-up for membership or an event to enter their email address TWICE, and have the form validated to make sure that they match?  This could help to reduce some bounces at the source. We have seen some websites which do this.

    Tracking opens and clicks would be nice, but not nearly as critical as reducing bounced emails and having a better way to flag and manage them.   

     
     Regards!

     

  •  07-30-2009, 9:15 PM 13725 in reply to 13723

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Understood. Though tracking bounces is a harder problem to implement, so we are now starting with tracking clicks and opens. Anyway, we will be moving on that.

    Re entering email twice - I am a bit skeptical. I see more and more people copy-paste between fields (or use  browser auto-fill) and mistake gets repeated anyway.

     


    Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
  •  08-20-2009, 9:57 AM 13982 in reply to 13725

    • Anonymous

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    Our programmers are currently working on the ability to tracking opened emails and click-throughs on links in emails.

    The system will record when a recipient first opens an email and keeps a count of this associated with the email blast.

    For click-throughs, you will have the ability to indicate on an email blast if you want to track if people click on the links in the emails. Then on the blast details you will be able to see the times each link in your email has been clicked.

    We are aiming to have this finished and included in version 3.2, which is planned for release in late September of this year.

     

  •  10-05-2009, 11:53 AM 14523 in reply to 13982

    • Anonymous

    Re: TRACKING EMAILS TO MEMBERS

    We heave released this feature with version 3.2 of Wild Apricot. It works as described above, allowing you to see if your recipients have opened their emails as well as if they have clicked on any links that may be included in the email.

    You can find it when creating any new blast emails in Settings -> E-mail drafts.

    Thank you for your suggestions and feedback as we developed this solution.

     

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