Use tracking links to test responsiveness of HTML emails

You can track the overall effectiveness of a subject line in opt in emails or test the amount of people that open your newsletter. This is provided the email/newsletter is using html.

It’s pretty simple. If you have graphics or images already embedded in your email, all you need to do is create a tracking link using your image URL. For instance, if your image url is:

http://example.com/images/image1.gif

this would be the URL or link that you would want to track. Once you have created your tracking link, simply replace the image URL in your HTML with the tracking link.

Example Before:
< img src="http://example.com/images/image1.gif" >

Example after:
< img src="http://example.com/tracking/tr.cgi?1234" >

The above code has extra spaces so that the HTML code will show properly here. What this does is track each time the image is called from the server, rendering as a “hit” for your tracking link telling you when someone has viewed the image (i.e. opened the email).

This will not work 100% of the time (such as when a recipients email will not show images) but is a good overall guide. This also works well when placing ads on classified ads sites that let you input your ad in html (I do this all the time).

If you do not have an image or picture that you want to include in the email, simply create a small transparent .gif image like 2px x 2px (size) and place that somewhere within your html emails, that will work as well using the above method. You can create a small image like that in an application like paint, or you could always go to someplace like google or yahoo images & do a search for a transparent .gif to find one. (hint: you won’t be able to see it.)

If anyone else has any suggestions for this type of tracking feel free to post it.