Difference between revisions of "Communications - Email Clickthru"

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Revision as of 23:17, 9 November 2014

1 Overview

Several clients have pointed out that when sending a group email it would be extremely useful often to track how many receivers have clicked into the email. Never able to resist a challenge we have this ability.


Project: Clickthru explains what we have done and how it works. This page is available as a stand alone doc from our Projects page Projects


2 Challenges of Mail Tracking

Traditionally, there are a number of routes to achieving this objective.

  • Delivery receipt
  • Read receipt
  • Website log activity
  • Clickthru


Read and delivery receipts are a less than perfect solution because, for reasons of security, many receiving servers permanently disable this function.


Website log activity shows people arriving at a website. The log contains a certain amount of information but it doesn’t include the source. In other words you will be able to monitor web site traffic but you will not be able to define the identity of your visitors. Alternatively, you could create a custom web page on a server and the server team could see how many times this specific page has been accessed. If the page could only be accessed from the email, then it would prove an accurate measure. However this setup demands a high IT overhead in the form of web development and web server log analysis.


This brings us to Clickthru. Previously this too required serious IT involvement. The BE Clickthru solution, however, minimises setup and makes the process manageable at user level.


3 Understanding how a Clickthru works

Consider the following

Clickthru explanation support.png

Steps

  1. Email arrives at a clients mailbox
  2. In the email is a specially formatted link to the chosen website
  3. Clicking the link opens a browser window with the specially formatted URL
  4. The page request goes to the BE server first
  5. The BE server records the fact that the code has been clicked
  6. It then forwards the user to the specified destination address


To the user this is almost instantaneous and takes no longer than a normal page would to open and load. Processing time is on average 0.2 seconds, to get to BE and then out to the new server.

4 Setting up a Clickthru

To make life as simple as possible Clickthru’s have been formatted so the server does all the complicated reporting work.


To set up a clickthru:

  1. Define which client or prospect group you are going to target
  2. Decide on the web page you want them to end up on.


In this example we want them to end up in Google, so www.google.ie

  1. Log into BE
  2. Communications Centre
  3. HTML Email Sending
  4. Campaign - Send a campaign rich text email
  5. Select your recipients and set up a normal group send
  6. Add your link to the body of the email
  7. In this case the call to action is ‘Click here to go to this great offer’
  8. Click ‘Code’ at the bottom of the screen to view the code of the email
  9. Format your link as follows.
    1. Code as it stands <a href=http://www.google.ie”> Click here to go to this great offer</a>
    2. Code required <a href=”{Clickthru-www.google.ie}”>Click here to go to this great offer</a>
  10. This will create a text link to www.google.ie
  11. When the email is sent BE will replace {Clickthru-www.google.ie} with http://ww3.allnone.ie/public/clickthru.asp?Id=XXXX&destination=www.google.ie


The Id is made up of a number of constituent parts

  • Unique Reference : 36 character reference code
  • DateTime: The “Original Send” date and time
  • System Id: To identify your BE system
  • Campaign Id: The campaign that this contact is in
  • CDA Id: The unique data record Id


5 Reporting on Clickthru

There is now a new report detailing Clickthru events in Communications Centre.

  1. Log into BE
  2. Communications Centre
  3. Communications Reporting
  4. Clickthru Report
  5. Choose the Campaign and Time frame for the users to have clicked a link.
  6. Select the actual original time send required to generate your report.


6 Clickthru Visibility

Clickthru’s should be invisible to the end user.


The send will be displayed as a contact history.


The Clickthru will also be stored in the contact history, so agents can see when a link has been clicked and how many times.