Newsletters and Email Tracking

Helps With

Choosing an email tracking system
assessing your priorities
getting best use from the data collected
staying within the spam laws

This helpsheet is a series of questions that are designed to help you understand the various options wen setting up a system to send emails. The answers have to come from you, however most of the questions are easy to answer if you have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.

Q1 Do you want a hosted service, a hosted system, a stand alone system?

A hosted service is a server, somewhere in a data centre that you rent a part of.
A hosted system is a server that you own, but hosted in a data centre.
A stand alone system may be an application on a local machine that pumps out the mail (not recommended!)

Q2 Do you need a system that is integrated into your other systems?

where does it get the recipient email addresses from
where does any unsubscribe and bounce information go, and how is this information managed (or does it only sit within the mail system)
do you need any information transferred back to your back office systems

Q3 Is it illegal? Immoral? Or worse still…SPAM!

are all the recipients from opt-in lists
who is responsible for ensuring that the sending SMTP server is not blacklisted

Q4 Who gets the email?

everyone in your database (that has not unsubscribed)
do you need to select subsets to target specific information at them
do you need to send a sequence of emails as a result of someone subscribing

Q5 What do you need to track when sending the mail?

how many mails were sent, and to whom
who opened the mail
who clicked on particular links in the email
who bought something as a result of the mail
who unsubscribed, and from which email they did so
do you want this information put back into your CRM system

Q6 What is the content of the mail?

is it HTML or plain text
how big is the mail (in kb)
are pictures included in the mail, or hosted on a web server somewhere
do you need to do a mail merge to enter Surname, Forename etc…

Q7 How important is the timing of the emails?

does the first one of the batch have to go out within 20 mins of the last one
could the mails be spread evenly over the month – one every 43 seconds
does it have to be sent during working hours
do you want them only sent on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as these are more likely to get a response