People don't like to be hunted. You by no means want to feel that someone has tagged your ear like an elk and now your migration pattern is available to be traced and studied. It's disturbing.
It brings back Cold War type fears when you learned that satellites could track your every move if they wanted to. Your phone could be bugged by an unscrupulous third-party and they would tape every word, mumble or breathe you released into your telephone.
More than a few of you wrote in inquiring about the capabilities of email tracking after reading the last Report. This is a topic that doesn't get much coverage and in the interest of educating our readers I'll tell you what others aren't. I'm as well as the responses that drove this issue at the bottom.
Email tracking sounds threatening at first. You wonder, "What are they using the information for?" Before we answer that, let's talk about the type of information we are able to gather from HTML based emails and how it is together.
When a marketer uses a publish platform that incorporate campaign presentation data, they are access an incomplete amount of information. Graphics that are entrenched within HTML messages offer data that can help a marketer determine a campaigns performance.
These graphics (aka: pixels, web bugs, or clear GIFs) offer easy tracking in email or basic HTML. A clear GIF is an imperceptible graphic that is usually 1 pixel by 1 pixel in size, hence, "I use pixel tracking technology."
When a user opens an HTML based email or HTML web page, graphics (pixels) are requested from the site hosting the HTML. This data includes:
- The IP address of the computer that is requesting the graphic
- The time the page containing the graphic was viewed
- The type of mail client or web browser that received the graphic
- If a marketer is using cookies, they could also check the recognition number of the cookie or update a cookie they had already placed if they choose to
Because email marketers can see if a graphic has been request and productively sent to a user, they count that as an "open". Correct now the technology is only able to track opens in HTML based emails. If you are using an email application, like Outlook, that provides a preview pane, if any graphic loads it is counted as an open. In text based messages, you can only track the number of clicks that occur on links embedded within an email.
In the case of quickly scanning an email, if single graphic loads during the time the email is open, it will register as an open. There is no way to determine if a message has been deleted, only if it has been opened. For the marketer to presume that the message was deleted is a bad assumption. Some of our email clients see opens as late as four weeks after the unique send date.
MVI reports a series of statistics for our readers in an attempt to demonstrate the capability of email tracking and to let readers know how they are responding to various issues. The first four numbers that we publish are the number of emails sent, the proportion of emails that bounced back, the percentage of readers who unsubscribed and the number of forwards using the tell a friend option.
Stats for the last MVI Report sent July 25, 2002
- Sent - 884 messages
- Bounce Rate - 3.28%
- Unsubscribe Rate - 0.90%
- Forwards - 1
- Unique Open Rate - 53.85%
- Click Rate - 5.66%
- Unique Click Rate - 5.66%
- Unique Click/Open Rate - 10.50%
There are then four other statistics that we publish to help gauge the newsletter success.
- Unique Open Rate refers to the unique number of readers who open the newsletter. We also track (but don't publish) the number of total opens which means that if someone opens the newsletter more than once, they register as an additional open, but not a unique open.
- Click Rate refers to the number of clicks generate from the newsletter. This number represents all clicks, including those users who click more than one link.
- Unique Click Rate refers to the number of clicks without counting duplicate clicks from a single user.
- Unique Click/Open Rate is a percentage based on the number of unique opens for the newsletter that also produced a unique click for any of the links in the article. This is also well thought-out to be the overall response rate to the message.
The system that MVI uses allows us to publish HTML, AOL and Text versions of our newsletter. Depending on what type of software the reader is using, the suitable email is then delivered to their inbox.
MVI's tracking system is built around ad serving technology so we can even update an email on the fly. We can publish updated content for HTML messages at any time during the course of an email campaign. If someone hasn't opened the message yet, or they open it again, they will see the updated content instead of the content that was at first published.
Often times, 3rd-party advertisers on a web site will request clear pixel tracking to ensure that advertising reports, provided by the site selling ads, are consistent with data received from the pixel tracking. In this case, it acts as an audit to ensure accuracy.
In some cases, this type of tracking can be trouble. Spammers can use HTML based emails to see if an email is a valid address by seeing if the message is opened. They can then add that address to a list of live addresses. Some may also use Clear GIFs or invisible graphics to set or read cookies on a recipient's computer. In this case, the marketer is looking at what information the cookie has collected since it was last looked at, such as the sites they have visited.
In most cases tracking is simply used to help marketers gauge the success of their online efforts. Respecting the privacy of the reader is paramount to successfully engaging in this type of tracking. Marketers have to be up front and direct with what they are using tracking information for and what they won't use information for. It's our responsibility to educate while we lead.
If we don't disclose what information we are tracking the backlash will be more dramatic than simply being honest up front. Permission marketing is still the buzz. It's critical that those you market to know exactly what they are giving you permission to do.