Ask HN: What email tools do you use to track opens?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1572858

by thentic • 16 years ago

2 3 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For some outbound email we use Mailchimp, but a lot of first time emails also go out through Gmail. What tools do you use and what are their pros/cons?

Travis• 16 years ago

Without trying to hijack your thread, I'm curious exactly HOW opens are tracked by these apps. They seem to stand by them (but they're evil marketing people).

Seems liek they just embed an image in your email. When it loads, they have a unique ID so they know which email was opened. Now, most email apps are starting to block images from displaying by default. Wouldn't this HUGELY skew the open rates? And if these rates are inconsistent (image week 0 default gmail is to open images, week 3 it's turned off... how could you make that comparison?)

So you could have massive swings in open rates due to a specific provider changing their policies. Or any number of other reasons.

So why do you track opens at all? Isn't that metric so inconsistent and inaccurate that it'd be better to track something else entirely?

thentic• 16 years ago

Good point. Spypig likely has the problem of skewed open rates due to image blocking and we chose not to use due to that issue.

Tracking opens for 'cold emails' or even referral-based emails is important but can be replaced with persistence. As long as persistence is constrained with a measure of decency.

I get referrals from the businesses who join our site and use email to initiate outreach to them. I just want to know who's opening versus who's not as it affects what script we use for a follow up phone call.

rcavezza• 16 years ago

I'm in the middle of deciding which tools to use. Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, and iContact have a lot of the same functionalities. I think there are a few standard functions you need and the rest comes down to how well you like the software's dashboard environment.

Ask HN: What email tools do you use to track opens?

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