How popular is my newsletter?

February 28, 2008 2:34 PM

Exchange 2003 SP2: Is there any way to tell how many users read a particular email or opened an attachment in that email?

My boss sends out a monthly newsletter (as an attachment) to our entire organization of about 800 users. He asked me to find out how many staffers actually read the email or open the attachment. I told him I don't think it's possible, at least not without a third-party tool. Even if you could, the read count wouldn't be accurate because a lot of users would click on and off the email (marking it as read) before deleting it without actually reading it. Either way, I thought I'd ask the hive mind for confirmation before reporting back to him with a final answer.

I doubt it matters but we use a mix of Outlook 2003 and 2007 on Windows XP SP2.

posted by bda1972 to technology (4 comments total)

Few options..

Add a "tracker bug" into the email message assuming it's HTML, record hits on the web server for that bug.

When sending the email, request a read receipt.. not incredibly accurate as people can choose not to send them, but it's something.

Your best bet might be make the attachment a link to a file on the web server, record hit information. That way you get to know how many (an who if IPs are unique/or a unique URL) actually took the time to read the attachment VS just opened/marked as read the email.

But I agree with your view on this, anything you do would be inaccurate.
posted by mattdini at 2:51 PM on February 28

Nothing in tracking and reporting is ever perfect.

He can send the newsletter with a link that says, "click here for the latest newsletter" and have that link go to the file/page on your site that hosts the newsletter. Then you can track the hits to that page/file on the server. An HTML email with some embedded tracking code might help too. That would basically be tracking the "opens" and then you can also track clicks from there. Now that I re-read mattdini's comment, it's pretty much what he says. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could probably run some sort of script that puts the email address or a unique ID (mapped back to a unique user) as the tag in the link regardless of whether you do attachment or HTML email. Then you would know who opened. I don't know if that's actually feasible, and users could still manipulate it, but it seems like it could work.

We are facing a similar situation with our customer newsletters. We send the newsletter (through Exchange) as HTML with tagged links and we check the tags against our internet traffic reporting software. Of course, we still don't know who opened it, or how many were opened, we only know how many clicks we get. We are in the process of switching to a full-functioned email marketing client in order to have that and other functionality.

I can't tell if this is an internal newsletter or external newsletter. Is he sending to employees that have to read it (and he wants to make sure they do)? Or is it going to organization members that will hopefully read it? If it's the latter, he's probably better off with an HTML newsletter with tracked links and not knowing the total opens, rather than an attachment-driven newsletter that allows him to track opens. I am 0% likely to open an attachment-based newsletter unless I really like the company (read: beauty product and shoe companies only!) and am willing to go through the hassle. People are more likely to actually see and read the newsletter if it's embedded. Something might catch their eye - even if they are clicking it ("opening") just to delete it.
posted by ml98tu at 3:49 PM on February 28

To clarify, it's an internal newsletter and I think he's just trying to decide whether it's worth sending out the newsletter at all. No user is expected or required to read it unless they want to.
posted by bda1972 at 4:43 PM on February 28

This tip seems to jibe with my recollection that Outlook can only do this with read receipts, or web bugs (which may be a bit of a pain to send from an Outlook client).

Of course, there's a ton of third-party web services that will do newsletter tracking for you, but all of them that I know of charge for their services. Almost every free solution I've looked at that has tracking which seems to work (OpenEMM, phplist) is not exactly straightforward to set up for end users.

I'd go web bug in the attachment, if the attachment is HTML. that should give you a good count of people who actually opened the attachment.
posted by fishfucker at 7:35 PM on February 28