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It's a pretty easy thing to get going. I made a 'pixel tracker' that is essentially what is a clear image on a website, but you put it in your email. The imag

It's a pretty easy thing to get going. I made a 'pixel tracker' that is essentially what is a clear image on a website, but you put it in your email. The image actually runs a process on the server that can increment a number, track IP's, etc. etc. and it will return an image. For an e-mail, you would want to include a company logo, signature, or something to entice them to "Show all images" because I know if I got an e-mail and there was no image that popped up, I'd think there is something fishy going on.

dgunn 14y ago
Agreed. I've used px trackers before but I'm not a fan of the work flow. I was thinking of a script in a bookmarklet or something that I click and if I'm in my gmail, it will contact my server for an image id and inject it at the bottom of my email. It would then detect when I click "send" so it could turn on the tracking. If I'm sending 100 emails just to test a market, it would be very worth while to me to spend on this. Especially since the market research may prove that I need a different market.
- subhobroto 14y ago
  I am pretty sure you will have more suggestions coming up, but what do you see lacking in "free" offerings like: http://whoreadme.com/ http://whoreadme.com/ The core concept is akin to pixel tracking done by a lot of companies for their analytics: however in my personal experience, for the specific situation of cold calling you describe, I have had better results with embedding two links into my email along the lines of: 1. "Let me know you are interested" 2. "Let me know you are not interested" This has worked better than passive pixelling as you are involving the person in the interaction directly instead of guessing what to do. You give them better control of their decisions. For example, a lot of email clients do cache pixels and you won't know if it was the client that fired the pixel or the person, but you can control that via a link. IN the native pixelling approach, you could end up cold calling (now over the phone) a person who was not interested in you but you thought so as their email client cached the pixel. People who see, even in the future, forging (or not) a relation with you will click a link, however busy they are. Those who do not, do not seem to be good leads anyways. I would love to hear your opinions on this.
  - dougbarrett 14y ago
    That seems like a pretty cool idea. You could combine the pixel tracking with the "Let me know you are interested" links. You're basically tracking opens & click throughs. You could then get data on who has opened the e-mail w/ imageS? Who has only clicked on a link? Who has done both? This is all pretty standard stuff for email campaign software, but there isn't much out there for emails that are going to be on a more personal, smaller scale.
    - dgunn 14y ago
      This is all pretty standard stuff for email campaign software, but there isn't much out there for emails that are going to be on a more personal, smaller scale. My point exactly
  - dgunn 14y ago
    This is actually a great idea. If someone offered something like this, I would expect that link tracking should also be part of it. My main issue with something like whoreadme is the idea of adding their domain to the email address. It adds clutter to my gmail contacts and it causes any replies to not be grouped as a conversation by gmail. This was a good idea but I think there are much better ways to achieve this goal.

dgunn 14y ago

Agreed. I've used px trackers before but I'm not a fan of the work flow. I was thinking of a script in a bookmarklet or something that I click and if I'm in my gmail, it will contact my server for an image id and inject it at the bottom of my email. It would then detect when I click "send" so it could turn on the tracking. If I'm sending 100 emails just to test a market, it would be very worth while to me to spend on this. Especially since the market research may prove that I need a different market.

subhobroto 14y ago
I am pretty sure you will have more suggestions coming up, but what do you see lacking in "free" offerings like: http://whoreadme.com/ http://whoreadme.com/ The core concept is akin to pixel tracking done by a lot of companies for their analytics: however in my personal experience, for the specific situation of cold calling you describe, I have had better results with embedding two links into my email along the lines of: 1. "Let me know you are interested" 2. "Let me know you are not interested" This has worked better than passive pixelling as you are involving the person in the interaction directly instead of guessing what to do. You give them better control of their decisions. For example, a lot of email clients do cache pixels and you won't know if it was the client that fired the pixel or the person, but you can control that via a link. IN the native pixelling approach, you could end up cold calling (now over the phone) a person who was not interested in you but you thought so as their email client cached the pixel. People who see, even in the future, forging (or not) a relation with you will click a link, however busy they are. Those who do not, do not seem to be good leads anyways. I would love to hear your opinions on this.
- dougbarrett 14y ago
  That seems like a pretty cool idea. You could combine the pixel tracking with the "Let me know you are interested" links. You're basically tracking opens & click throughs. You could then get data on who has opened the e-mail w/ imageS? Who has only clicked on a link? Who has done both? This is all pretty standard stuff for email campaign software, but there isn't much out there for emails that are going to be on a more personal, smaller scale.
  - dgunn 14y ago
    This is all pretty standard stuff for email campaign software, but there isn't much out there for emails that are going to be on a more personal, smaller scale. My point exactly
- dgunn 14y ago
  This is actually a great idea. If someone offered something like this, I would expect that link tracking should also be part of it. My main issue with something like whoreadme is the idea of adding their domain to the email address. It adds clutter to my gmail contacts and it causes any replies to not be grouped as a conversation by gmail. This was a good idea but I think there are much better ways to achieve this goal.