Re: How to know whether a person clicked a link in an email

Subject: Re: How to know whether a person clicked a link in an email
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 08:51:50 -0400




Caroline Tabach wrote:

Our company sends various documents to people we work with from time to
time.
We have been told that there is a way of embedding a personalized link
so I can know whether John Smith accessed the link I sent him in the
email.
What we want to do is to send people a letter saying "Dear X, We have a new document with interesting information, click here to read
it"
I need to know if John (and each person to whom the letter was sent)
clicked the link to read the document.
Does anyone know how to set this up?


There are marketing companies that specialize in providing this service. If your company has the budget for it, that would be the easiest way to go, as it would not take any development resources to implement it. Talk to someone in your marketing department to find out if they already have a relationship with such a company.

However, if you want to develop this facility in-house, it's not too hard.

First, using your Web-server-supported language of choice (I use ASP because I'm familiar with it, but you can use whatever you want), write a program that builds and sends the email messages. It should open a text file you upload and, reading one line at a time that has some identifier for the recipient (id number or email address), access your database to find the person's email address, first name, and id number, then insert those into appropriate places in an html email message:

"Dear John,

"... click <a href='http://www.company.com/documents/document.asp?id=48592875>here</a>..."

where the first part of the id is some number that corresponds to the document (it doesn't have to be meaningful in terms of the document's part number; basically it's just there to give you something to parse later) and the next part is the user's id number and the final digit is some sort of check digit to help filter out people who want to play head games with you.

Then the program should send out the email, using the server's mail program, and work through the text file to the end in this manner.

The page document.asp should parse the id number in the request to determine that it is a valid request and to figure out who the requestor is. It should then write a record to a text file that you can later use to analyze who accessed the document and when (or you can write this information to a table in the database if that better suits your needs). The page should then automatically forward the browser to the actual file to download.

It's not rocket science, but it's more than a five-minute job the first time you do it.

HTH,

Dick

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References:
How to know whether a person clicked a link in an email: From: Caroline Tabach

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