Tracking email opens

My company wants to track how many emails we send out, how many get opened, how many click-through, and what the conversion is on those emails.

We use WebSideStory and we send out our own emails, without the help of an agency. We already track the emails a Campaigns in HBX, so we know the click through rate. What we don't know is how many get opened.

Step 1 is to either place a tracking gif in the email or take note of an image that's already there. In our case, the banners for all our emails are unique, so all we need to do is count how many times our servers received a request for that image. The catch is that emails don't have the HBX javascript file, so we can't track it in HBX.

Step 2 is to get reports from the log files that show how many they were requested. So here our engineers need to be involved since we primarily rely on the ASP model web tracking of HBX.

Step 3 is figuring out what the "open rate" really means. Here's a good article that describes what "open" actually refers to.

Here's someone who's offering up their custom code for free.

If you're sending text-only emails, read this.