“Track Everything” Isn’t Just For Advertising
I recently had a client who had a very big product launch. In fact, it was so big that the servers couldn’t keep up!
Consequently, there were many people who “signed up” for his service but never received the “activation” email. And inside the activation email was a link that activated the customer’s account.
Fortunately, my client’s software logged the email address for every “signup” AND for every “confirmation”. So all he had to do was extract the emails from the “signup” list that were NOT in the “activated” list, and re-send the activation link to those people.
This is a perfect illustration of the necessity of logging data for every stage of your process. Any time someone fills out a form or takes an action of any kind, you should be keeping a record of it.
If you have a privacy policy, make sure its verbage takes this into account.
Speaking of Privacy Policies, it’s sometimes interesting to see what a merchant’s machine readable “compact” privacy policy is saying. I created a little tool that translates the machine-readable code to human-readable format — you can plug in your website of interest and see what they’re policy is. Just click the link below to open this tool in a new window:
Analyze A Site’s “Compact” Privacy Policy
Now do me a favor — let me know what questions you may have about internet marketing technology in general — just leave a comment or click on the contact form link on the right side of this page.
Thanks!
Paul
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April 10th, 2007 at 9:01 am
I just wondered about the wiseness or otherwise of contacting people that do not activate confirmation emails. How many times can you ask them to activate before you are sending them unsolicted email, I guess?
Thanks,
Steve
April 10th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
That’s a good point, which I fully expected someone to bring up when I made the post.
It’s not something you want to do without really weighing the pros and cons.
In this case it seems to me like a reasonable action — the reason my client did it was because many of the initial confirmation emails were never sent out in the first place (because of the server issues).
So they were between a rock and a hard place.
Either they could re-send the confirmation message to everyone who hadn’t confirmed (knowing some of them had probably received the initial email and hadn’t clicked on the confirmation link), OR they could NOT re-send it, knowing there were several hundred people who had signed up for the service and hadn’t been able to activate it.
Every situation has its own set of circumstances which dictate the action to be taken — but even then, sometimes it’s a case of deciding which option is the lesser of two evils . . .
Best,
Paul
June 20th, 2007 at 2:09 am
Sometimes tracking might have the adverse effect. I realized that my getrespone embedded links have 50% lesser clickthroughs. So much so for tracking.
Regards,
Edmund Ng