Email: Email Tracking Services

Every day we receive and send dozens of letters. This has become a routine procedure and, it would seem, for so many years, what could change? But progress does not stand still - there are companies that are trying to discover the "blue ocean" by offering new services. If the idea is successful, then competitors will soon catch up, and users will be able to choose the most suitable offer.


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Speaking of additional functionality of e-mail, first of all comes the idea of ​​tracking the opening of letters. Standard mail clients suggest inserting a request into a letter so that the recipient will decide whether to inform the sender of the opening letter or not. And usually it is very annoying, so I rarely respond positively to it.



And what if you do not ask the recipient, but simply send the information to the sender? A good idea and relatively uncomplicated implementation led to the appearance on the market of a number of companies that offer tracking services for sent emails, as well as additional options aimed at improving sales.

The principle of operation of these services is basically the same - a picture with a size of 1 pixel is embedded in the letter, and when the letter opens, it pulls the server. Therefore, it is impossible to track the discovery for those recipients whose image display is disabled. How it works in practice, consider a specific example.

Signals (http://www.getsignals.com/)

This service has been recommended to me by my foreign colleague, whom he has faithfully served for a period of time. In practice, it turned out that the notification arrives even when the letter is opened by the addressee who uses Outlook, where pictures are disabled by default. Therefore, it was concluded that the main thing is not the fact of opening pictures, but their presence. That is, letters must be received in HTML-format, and not in text.



A little about the service itself: it works with Outlook and Gmail.com, and the information about opening letters falls into the plugin for Chrome. Everything happens very quickly. The service also allows you to track down if someone from the contact database has visited your site. Here's how they tell about themselves (http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/sales-tools-to-help-close-deals-list): “Imagine that you see an alert that one of your potential customers viewing the price list on the site. Now you know for sure that now is a good time to call and complete the transaction. ”

The service has a free tariff plan, which includes 200 alerts per month.

ContactMonkey (https://contactmonkey.com/)

Signals for me with Outlook did not work, so alternatives were considered. In ContactMonkey, I was attracted by the name and the lack of need to use Chrome. The installation option for Outlook 2010 was selected. The service has created a separate tab for itself in the main menu, through which you can view alerts. This solution turned out less elegant, because the alert information does not appear immediately - you need to update the list manually.



ContactMonkey also has a free tariff plan, which includes 100 alerts, and paid starts at $ 5 per month.

There are other similar services, for example, Yesware (http://www.yesware.com/), ToutApp (http://www1.toutapp.com/) with their own "highlights".

Sfletter.com (https://sfletter.com/)

There were no similar decisions in the domestic market. However, an interesting version from StarForce was discovered in the Russian space. In general, the sfletter.com service is designed to protect emails and attachments from leakage, and as a bonus, information is provided on the opening time of the letter and the recipient’s IP address. He also keeps track of unsuccessful attempts to open letters (protection against forwarding to third parties).



In order to open the protected file, the recipient needs to download and install a special viewer program. Actually, thanks to her, the sender receives information about the opening of letters. It looks cumbersome, but justified by the tasks of the service. Moreover, if the correspondence is carried out on an ongoing basis, then you can tinker with the installation once.

To use the service, you need to register the box on sfletter.com. The service works on a free basis.

Docusign (https://www.docusign.com/)

Studying the topic of postal services, you can find a huge variety of different baubles and lotions that can satisfy any wishes of customers. The last service that I would like to mention allows you not only to track the status of the sent document, but also to collect signatures from recipients.



Signing documents is done directly through the web interface, which is much faster and easier than “print-sign-scan-send”.

Unfortunately, this service has no free tariff plans, but it gives 14 days to test.

In conclusion, I would like to note that in Russia, in principle, there are few interesting services “for all”. Most likely, this is due to the fact that it is very difficult to become commercially successful in a large-scale market. Therefore, most companies prefer to engage in customized / corporate development.