E-Mail Marketing

Email this article Printer friendly page

"Will tracking placed in HTML newsletters like those sent out by Got Marketing and Constant Contact be picked up by anti-spyware software and will consumers become annoyed by this marketing practice?" -- Rick Bayer

Spyware attaches itself to your computer to cause its intrusive marketing activity. However, the tracking commonly used in e-mail messages doesn't flag anti-spyware programs and recipients seldom notice them. The tracking tags are typically of two types:

Coded Links. A link can contain an ad tracking code, an affiliate code, or a number that identifies your customer record in the e-mail sender's database. These often use a number or code that follows a question mark in the URL, such as:

http://www.domain.com/link.htm?id=1255791

Coded Images. An HTML e-mail message can contain an "invisible" GIF image. When the recipient opens the message when his computer is connected to the Internet, the HTML calls the sender's server to display that GIF image. This is commonly used to determine the "open rate" of an e-mailing. The URL used to call that image can also carry a code that identifies the message or even your record in the sender's database, such as:

<img src="http://www.domain.com/image.gif?id=1255791">

I strongly recommend that e-mail advertisers tag their URLs so they can track the effectiveness of their ads. People don't seem to complain. But occasionally spam filters might interpret codes after the question mark in a URL as a characteristic of spam.