General Consultant Discussion

I spent alot of time looking for a solution to see if people read emails I sent. As you probably know, 'return receipts' are pretty useless as PC users can simply ignore the request, most web based email and mobile devices don't even support it. I tried a few and have found: http://www.readnotify.com/?from=lih398p8p99jr to be the best and very reasonably priced. They basically embed an invisible graphic in the email. As long as the recipient doesn't specifically turn off images (most don't anymore since so much email depends on the images), then it can track if they read it, when, geographically, where, how many times and if they forwarded it. This particular solution has a slick plugin (works best with outlook) to make turning it on and off very simple. However, you can use it without a plugin as well by modifying the recipient address. The main reason this is important is if you are involved in sales, its very valuable to know if a prospect saw your email and is just ignoring you, vs. never read it, ended up in spam filter etc. Please use the link above or 'mchinsky' in the promotion code field if you sign up later. It gets me some brownie points and extra months of service

How long have you been using this and what's the % that it cannot track? I have something similar in Freshbooks (which we use for invoicing) and there's a decent # who get the invoices but we haven't been able to track. I'd be worried that bigger companies have this type of thing blocked.

I've found it to be about 80-90% effective. You never really know as unless you call somebody it claims didn't read it and they say they read it, how do you know? I've personally tested it with our exchange, our various spam filters (viper), and with gmail, & outlook.com and optonline.net and they all work perfectly. I'll send you an email now and see

You can send me one as well dan@burleson.com as I don't have images automatically downloaded. After a while I'll download the images.

Gmail defaults to not display images.

That's true but the majority of my clients/prospects aren't using a gmail account. Either way, its way better than asking for a return receipt or nothing.