Recently I received an e-mail marketing piece from AIGA.
About a day later I received another email from AIGA with a title of “Revised
Registration: …” and it got me to thinking about why this doesn’t usually happen
to me. What has happened is in this case AIGA, the sender, had to resend their e-mail to their entire
list with a fixed link, the registration link no less. This not only is a bad
thing because some people may unsubscribe if they think it’s spam, but this
might also make an email server or filtering service false-positively mark a
message as spam and never deliver it to the recipient in the first place.
This is a little technical, but I’ll try and write it out
long-windedly in layman terms. Some of the terminologies I’ll use:
Server – The physical box that runs
the programs
Webserver – The application on the
physical box that handles requests from end users by serving webpages.
Webpage preprocessor – The application
executed by a webserver that translates server-side code into a scripted
language for the web browsers of the end users or visitors.
List – A list of email address in
the mail server.
Sending Service (or list management
service) – A contracted service that maintains and manages e-mail subscriber
lists, unsubscribe lists, and sometimes user subscription preferences.
Spam – Unsolicited [commercial]
e-mail
I receive occasional requests from my clients to edit an
e-mail marketing piece once it has already been sent. Usually it’s a price
change or some little tweak like a company name being split between lines in
some obscure browser, but every once in a while it’s because of something else…
a link going down, a website being
moved, a photograph that needs to be changed. In regard to the text content,
because of the way the internet works, the way e-mail browsers work, and high
requirements for [the illusion of] internet security, it would be a “bad thing”
if people were able to change things in your inbox once they were filtered by
something like an antivirus application, an anti-spam firewall, or corporate
e-mail server. If people could change a “trusted” link to something else once received,
then they could circumvent the protections altogether. A lot of people will
click on anything that looks remotely legitimate anyhow, so they would
definitely click on a link they believed to be legitimate because their super
expensive filtering system tells them it is safe. Because of this any content
that has been sent as HTML or Text-Only cannot be altered in the client’s Inbox
(legally and ethically).
NOTE: Mistakes always happen and this is why everyone should
thoroughly proofread anything going to a huge list of e-mail recipients. Also
rushing to send out an e-mail marketing piece (typically the case) is bad
practice. If you can afford a little more time it might save 10% of a mailing
list.
There are a couple of exceptions to this rule. You can alter
where it goes ultimately if you control the links. This of course depends on
the sending service you’re using and the type of system they have in place. It’s
always best to use a sending service to handle e-mail marketing pieces because
of the risks in regard to having your own email server ending up on a blocklist
or anti-spam blacklist (Check back later). Most sending services (the great
ones) allow you to provide your own HTML and text-only content. Some require
that they make the code for you in their WYSIWYG interface. When you’re setting
up the links for a “mailblast” or e-mail marketing piece there are a few things
that you can do in order to make edits after the piece has been delivered. The
tricks are all done on a web server. Now to do this, you’ll need to know what
type of webserver (Apache or IIS) you’re using and possibly what language it’s
running (PHP, ASP, Java, etc).
For most of my clients I setup something called a redirect
(302 technically). A redirect tells a visiting browser that a page has moved,
either temporarily or permanently. When you use a redirect link, not only can
you change the link on the server side in regard to where the end user is being
sent, but you can also do other things with information from the e-mail. You can
now marry their IP address and session information to anything they do on your
website. So if you were wondering if that project manager with enormous buying
power working for one of the potential clients you’ve been targeting is
actually reading your e-mails, now you’ll know, AND you can retroactively pair
their IP address presently with your webserver logs or high-level statistics to
see what they’ve been interested in and looking at. This is all provided you
have the system in the place and the proper people to translate what you’re looking
at.
The overall premise
So if we’re plugging a tradeshow promotion, then I’ll setup
a link on the client’s website in a custom directory (eg. TRADESHOW_012013).
Some sending services allow you to set off-site links for
the mailings in your HTML code and Text-only counterpart. So for the setup, you
could for instance make the TRADESHOW_012013 that contains a redirect link with
a target folder or alias that goes to a page in an “events” directory called “TRADESHOW-2013-January”
when someone selects the link in their e-mail client.
So they would start with a link here:
http://www.somefakewebsite.com/TRADESHOW_012013/
http://www.somefakewebsite.com/TRADESHOW_012013/
And end up here:
http://www.somefakewebsite.com/events/TRADESHOW-2013-January/
The redirect can be created in the webserver configuration
(not so good), the website’s configuration (a little better), or in the code
(best) that is executed on the server if you’re using a server-side language.
Option 1.) Dynamic Code Handling – Best Option
If you were to do this with a server-side scripting language
like PHP or ASP, the visitor would first (for a split second) visit the TRADESHOW_2013
directory (they might even see it in their address bar), then they would be
instantly redirected to the appropriate folder. In order for this method to
work properly, the sending service needs to allow you to set your links and
they should not be altered in the end code that is presented to the client.
This would give you the most control. This server-side dynamic coding approach allows
your pages to load faster (overall) because you’re only doing this for certain
links.
So what happens if the file original file is no longer
available on the server?
Conversely, some sending services actually follow all
redirects to reach an end target and only deliver the end user to the content
they believe they’re receiving. They’ll rewrite the link in the email content
that you provide with their own tracking scripts.(Eg. Although they’re not a
sending service, Facebook does this with certain links, so when you paste a
link, they actually follow all of the redirects so they can show you the
content you’re seeking. This way they don’t have to worry about someone
intercepting any of their traffic.) If this is the type of service that you
typically use for sending your e-mail marketing campaigns, what will happen is
when someone selects the link in their email, rather than seeing your TRADESHOW_012013
redirect folder, they will only see the end page. These are a little harder to
control, but not impossible. The problem is you’ll need to make sure the end
page doesn’t exist anymore, or qualify someone for a redirect (a little more
difficult).
Option 2.) Webserver Scripting – Second-Best Option
This doesn’t need to be a physical file on an Apache
webserver because you can perform the redirect in the .htaccess file with
mod_rewrite [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html]. In newer
versions of IIS [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732969%28v=ws.10%29.aspx]
you can set up a web.config file to use redirects and rewrite maps.
NOTE: Remember because of the way the webserver needs to
recognize the request it can take longer for a server to process every single
page on the site if you make a list of qualifying redirects in the server
configuration file. In short if you make 35 redirects, the site has to make
sure that every page on the server isn’t one of the 35 redirects before it
forwards people appropriately or serves a page.
One of the resources I use is at webconfs.com:
NOTE: If you omit the lines in the redirect instructions that say “301”
(permanent), you will by default create a 302
(temporary) redirect.
Changing Images
Just like changing links in an email, you can sometimes
replace an image in a campaign that has been sent, depending on the sending
service and the way they manipulate your code. If you are using a service like
Vertical Response, you can upload images to a directory on their website and
link to them directly. You can also upload the images to your own webserver and
then link to those in the code. In my experience with Vertical Response you can
successfully alter links and images in the emails once they’re sent. The
higher-end email sending service I use is called Campaign Monitor, and they’re
a little more tricky because even if you link to an image on a website they
will actually pull the image into their archives and link to THAT instead of
the original image. Campaign Monitor is all about end-user protections and
anti-spam which is excellent, but sometimes when an image contains faulty
information or something where no release was obtained it’s a little more of an
issue to get it changes after the sending.
When you’re using a sending service that doesn’t alter the
end image source links to replace an image all you need to do is to physically
replace the source image on the destination server. The next time the email
client opens the email they should reload the updated image. (Sometimes they
don’t if they use caching).
Worst case scenario you can specify a redirect link in the
site’s configuration file that tells the end user the destination for an
alternate image.
