Using Alpha WAS to Track your Email Campaign

Take a look at any email in your inbox from a large company or news organization. Look at the properties of one of the hyperlinks. Rather than something simple like www.thisdomain.com/thisfile.htm, it will be more complex, like this one from TechRepublic:

http://ct.techrepublic.com/clicks?t=3D4546025-7c2bf&s=35&fs=3D0

That link has everything it needs to identify you as the person that clicked the link, which email campaign it came from, and the page that should be displayed. They could, if they wanted to, instantly send you a new email and say "Hello YOURNAME, You just clicked that link!". They don't because it is rude, and because you'd figure out they were spying on you. Rather, they are more subtle, modifying what you get in the future based on what you clicked today. By the way, even if you don't click on any link, they know you opened the email. But you knew that your email spies on you, right?

While reviewing an email tracking product, I figured out how to use Alpha WAS to do exactly the above. It was really much more simple than I imagined, and a very good exercise. Here's how:

Let's say you are using Alpha NetMailer or any other "mail merge" program to send personalized email to your Customer list. A link to your website would normally look like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/thispage.htm

To inititiate tracking, replace your hyperlink with something like this:

http://www.myalphawas.com/redir.a5w?id=12345&lnk=http://www.mydomain.com/thispage.htm

" id " is the personalized Customer_ID and " lnk " is the actual link that should open when they click the link. This is a simplistic example, normally you would want to obscure the Customer ID and Link Address so others can't determine what they really are by looking at the link. " redir.a5w " is your Alpha Five Web Server page that processes the request. The redir.a5w page is very simple, and looks like this:

if eval_valid("lnk") then
response.redirect(lnk)
else
response.redirect("http://www.alphatogo.com")
end if

This portion just redirects the browser to the value in the "lnk" argument. Note I have a default redirection in case the value in lnk is omitted.

Now if you want to keep a record of this transaction, create a table with fields Customer and Lnk, and add this to the code:

tbl=table.open("Clicked")
tbl.enter_begin()
tbl.Customer=id
tbl.Link=lnk
tbl.enter_end()

This portion sends one record per click to a database table. The above will create a record of the Customer ID and the Link that was clicked. Useful information if you know how to use it. Your records would look something like this:

ID,LNK
12345,www.yahoo.com

The above is pretty simplistic. You would want to capture some additional information such as the date and time and the specific email campaign. Also, even though this is a good exercise, you may want to purchase a ready-made email blast program with a "Tracking" option; they really pack in a lot of charts and graphs to make the most of your email marketing efforts.