Anybody who’s worked in a cubicle is familiar the Outlook Request Read Receipt — that horrid popup that demands you confirm you have indeed read (and summarily deleted) the TSP report Ted from accounting had sent out. Now, Tout, a new email tracking app, does the same. Huzzah?
Tout is pretty straight forward. Compose and send a message through the Tout app and you can immediately check as to which of your recipients have read it using the tracking suite. It also records any links followed from within the message.
The company is keeping its actual tracking method a secret, though I can’t imagine them being that much different from iContact’s or MovableInk’s. It is available on the iPhone and online through the Tout website and as a gmail plugin. Any way you access it, this is the sort of feedback that marketers dream of — hard, accurate numbers providing reliable stats on a campaign’s performance. Get ready for your spam to become a whole lot more accurate. [Tout via Business Insider]
John
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:02 PMDon’t marketers use professional bulk email clients – that have long allowed you to track all sorts of data about who opens your emails and who clicks on links and when, etc?
Jamie
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:05 PMIt’s TPS report. Maybe you should have read it?
Brent
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:36 PMI’ll send you another copy of the memo concerning TPS reports.
Nate
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:47 PMIf you could just go ahead and remember to use the new coversheet on the TPS reports before they go out from now on… that’d be greeaaaat
Ryan
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:57 PMThe are only 2 ways to track if an email has been read, the user either clicks on a link within the email or the email downloads an image (usually a 1kb blank.gif). With phone clients (i.e. iPhone) having download images as a default this will work, whereas an email client like outlook, not so much.
bill
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 8:11 PMyyyeah, see the things is we’re using new cover sheets on all the TPS reports, so if you could remember to go ahead and do that from now on that’d be great.