Email Features

I don't have much experience with Email campaigns, but I can make some general observations:

>Successful Sent -I know you can open the campaign manager and look at
>the completed campaign but it showed 1 entry was successful even
>though it was a purposely invalid email address. We want to know the
>ones that actually went through.
>
>Bounced email- I have sucessfully gotten it to work.

I'm not sure what you're asking here. The ones that actually went through are the ones that didn't bounce.

>Can we tell if the message is opened at the recipients end? It seems
>to me that is dependent on the recievers software

That's correct. Even if you could send read receipt requests you would have no way of knowing whether the recipients' mail clients will respect them. Therefore, they are fairly useless.

>Can we track whether a client clicked on the hyperlink included in
>the mail?

That sort of depends on the hyperlink, doesn't it? You could include a unique identifier in the URL you send, so your template would look something like

Dear {First Name?}:

Have we got a deal for you! Please visit our site at

http://www.foo.bar/baz.php?ID={IDentification?}

Sincerely,
Our Company

then you could have a script on the webserver to log their visit. In PHP, that might look like

<?php

$cid = odbc_connect("EsconaTutorial", "MASTER", "control");

$SQL = 
   "UPDATE U_VISITED_CAMPAIGN_WEBPAGE SET U_Visited_campaign_webpage = 'Yes' " .
      "WHERE Client_Id='" . $_GET['ID'] . "'";

$result = odbc_exec($cid, $SQL);

// followed by the HTML for your actual page
?>

[This message was edited by Gord Thompson on July 16, 2003 at 11:00 PM.]

Thanks for your answers.

To give more detail to the first part:

Maximizer did indeed show a successful sending of an email even though it was bounced back as undeliverable. Maximizer did send back a message to the specified sender address so I knew it was undeliverable but when I viewed the completed campaign and looked at the subscribers to see which ones were successful and which ones were not, it showed the one that went to the undeliverable address was successful. I hope this detail helps.

Thanks again for your answers.

>when I viewed the completed campaign and looked at the subscribers to
>see which ones were successful and which ones were not, it showed the
>one that went to the undeliverable address was successful

It shows that it was successfully sent to your mail server, which does not necessarily mean that it was successfully delivered by your mail server.

In the simplest case, the messages take the following route:

1. The Maximizer Email service sends the message to your mail (SMTP) server.

2. Your mail server sends the message to the recipient's mail server.

3. The recipient's mail server sends the message to them.

Maximizer can only verify that step 1 was completed. Once it has contacted your mail server and said "Here's a message for baz@foo.bar", and your mail server accepted it, Maximizer considers it successful. Any further communication between the mail servers is outside of Maximizer's purview.

Between Step 1 and Step 2 (say Step 1b for example!?) is also in my experiance the biggest problem that i have seen in Maximizers Campaign Manager cycle.

An MS Exchange Admin guy or Network Admin see an open relay, whether it be a total open relay (not a good idea) or an authenticated relay for your Maximizer Server (they might not know what it is) and they shut it.

A call is made by a Maximizer user saying that their campaign manager isn't working.

It is.

The Mail Server is rejecting them.

The best way to test this is to create a Test Campaign with an external email address in it and an Internal email address. one should arrive at its destination (the internal one) and the other one won't (external)

Regards
CABC Support

>A call is made by a Maximizer user saying that their campaign manager
>isn't working.
>
>It is.
>
>The Mail Server is rejecting them.


Could be, but in that case Maximizer recognizes them as having failed because the local mail server returns an error (e.g. "550 - relaying denied").

i would have thought that as well, but it still surprises me how many time it doesn't get picked up (even by the logs)

Regards
CABC Support

>it still surprises me how many time it doesn't get
>picked up (even by the logs)

Fair enough. In retrospect, I realize that I should have said:

"...in that case Maximizer should recognize them as having failed because the local mail server should return an error..."

Maximizer will create a successful note if the Maximizer Email service was able to relay the message to the Email Server. If the email address is bogus the Email Server will get a bounce back but that will not be indicated in the Maximizer Notes.

You can get a third party application like WebTrends to track how many of your campaigns were opened. Basically it works as a 1 pixel image in your HTML email, that image is stored on your IIS machine and everytime the image is accessed (email opened) Web Trends will count that for you. (Yes autoview counts as an open). Same concept works for your URL being clicked from the campaign email.

As for Opt outs you can automate this with the integrators toolkit, but with Version 8 coming out in Beta soon, you may want to hold off on costly customization until you see whats new, if they have addressed that or not. In the meantime a "Get me off your Mailing List NOW!" email with a manual removal should suffice.

Thats my story and I'm sticking to it.

Any suggestions on how to easily select the contacts in Maximizer that have been bounced back? I have an Outlook folder full of 850 emails that have been bounced, and I'd like to somehow create a list in Maximizer that a customer service rep can work through to call the end user and verify the e-mail address.

>I have an Outlook folder full of 850 emails that have been bounced,
>and I'd like to somehow create a list in Maximizer

I had to do something similar a while back. Although the ultimate destination wasn't Maximizer the principle is the same. Here's how I did it:

- First I imported the Outlook folder into MS-Access.

- Then I used a Perl script and ODBC to scan the message bodies and extract the Email addresses that bounced. IIRC I got it to work for about 95% of the messages, at which point it was easier to fill in the rest by hand than to tweak the Perl script any more.

- Then, if I was going to dump the information into Maximizer I would put together an MTI file that created a UDF, something like this:

"MTI: whatever"
"BUSINESS_PEOPLE","2","129","E-mail Address"
"IDV_FIRM","OWNER","E-mail Address","P_MAIL_STATUS"
"ALPHA-1","ALPHA-11","ALPHA-119","ALPHA-7"
"1","Public","trout@fish.com","Bounced"
"1","Public","monkey@ape.com","Bounced"

[This message was edited by Gord Thompson on August 27, 2003 at 02:52 PM.]

Gord,

Thanks, I've written a perl script to extract, sort, and deduplicate the email addresses. Now instead of creating a new Maximizer database with the bogus addresses, what I'd like to do is select the contacts from an existing Maximizer database.

Thanks,

Mark

Hi, Mark.

>what I'd like to do is select the contacts from an existing Maximizer
>database

The sample MTI file I posted above will insert a UDF into an existing Address Book. However, it works for Individuals but apparently not for Contacts (I tried it). Oh well, I'm merely a dabbler in MTI anyway.

So I threw together a little Perl script to insert the UDF values via ODBC, but all it gives me is...

"Error: Runtime exception"

...when I try to run it.

However, if you have MS_Access then the following should work. (I just tried a small test and it worked for me.)

1. Create a UDF in your Maximizer database called "MAIL_STATUS", alphanumeric, 7 characters long.

2. Use the ODBC applet in the Windows Control Panel to create a System DSN for your Maximizer database.

3. Create an Access database and import your list of Email addresses into a table called "bounced" containing a single text field called "email".

4. Still in Access, use

File > Get External Data > Link tables...

and select "ODBC Databases" to link the following tables via the DSN you creates in step 2:

U_E_MAIL_ADDRESS
U_MAIL_STATUS

(Even if you haven't enabled security in the Maximizer database you will still be prompted for a UserID and password. In that case, use "MASTER" and "control" respectively.)

5. Create a new query using the following SQL statement:

INSERT INTO U_MAIL_STATUS ( Client_Id, Contact_Number, U_MAIL_STATUS ) 
SELECT U_E_MAIL_ADDRESS.Client_Id, U_E_MAIL_ADDRESS.Contact_Number, "Bounced" AS Expr1 
FROM U_E_MAIL_ADDRESS 
INNER JOIN bounced ON U_E_MAIL_ADDRESS.U_E_mail_Address = bounced.email;

6. Run that query.


As I said above, that worked for me. Still, these important disclaimers apply:

- Do this at your own risk.

- Always back up your data before attempting this sort of Voodo.

- YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

- Free advice is worth every penny.

- ...and so on.