

Ask HN: What email tools do you use to track opens? - thentic

For some outbound email we use Mailchimp, but a lot of first time emails also go out through Gmail. What tools do you use and what are their pros/cons?
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Travis
Without trying to hijack your thread, I'm curious exactly HOW opens are
tracked by these apps. They seem to stand by them (but they're evil marketing
people).

Seems liek they just embed an image in your email. When it loads, they have a
unique ID so they know which email was opened. Now, most email apps are
starting to block images from displaying by default. Wouldn't this HUGELY skew
the open rates? And if these rates are inconsistent (image week 0 default
gmail is to open images, week 3 it's turned off... how could you make that
comparison?)

So you could have massive swings in open rates due to a specific provider
changing their policies. Or any number of other reasons.

So why do you track opens at all? Isn't that metric so inconsistent and
inaccurate that it'd be better to track something else entirely?

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thentic
Good point. Spypig likely has the problem of skewed open rates due to image
blocking and we chose not to use due to that issue.

Tracking opens for 'cold emails' or even referral-based emails is important
but can be replaced with persistence. As long as persistence is constrained
with a measure of decency.

I get referrals from the businesses who join our site and use email to
initiate outreach to them. I just want to know who's opening versus who's not
as it affects what script we use for a follow up phone call.

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rcavezza
I'm in the middle of deciding which tools to use. Constant Contact, Mail
Chimp, and iContact have a lot of the same functionalities. I think there are
a few standard functions you need and the rest comes down to how well you like
the software's dashboard environment.

