Not too long ago I wrote a post about Form Wizard and how to utilize it and integrate it into your website.

Form Wizard is a handy tool to easily create a simple sign-up form to add to your website. The form writes directly to the ReachMail list of your choosing. If you want to read the how-to instructions, check the old post or watch the video.

Form Wizard has a powerful feature that is sometimes overlooked. It’s the Auto-Responder. Sounds cool, right? It is. What does it do? It sends an automatic email to any new users as soon as they are in your list. Why is that important? It helps you put your best foot forward with all your new list members.

Here’s a sample scenario. Say your company (Acme, Inc.) sends out a monthly newsletter on the first Monday of every month because you’ve wisely heeded the advice of some email marketing experts. A new user joins your list on the tenth of the month. They’ll be waiting a couple of weeks at least for the first email. In the meantime, they’re apt to forget that they signed up. Know what happens when users forget they signed up? Opt-outs. And Spam Complaints.

Enter the Auto-Responder. The auto-responder comes to the user shortly after they’re entered into the list and is a great reminder that they’ve joined and gives you a chance to welcome them and give a preview of what they can expect from your emails. If I were making an auto-responder for this monthly newsletter list I might say something like this: Thanks for joining the Acme, Inc. monthly newsletter! We hope you find it an informative window into our company. You can expect our newsletter on the first Monday of every month. In it, we’ll have recap of the the past month, a look ahead to the new month and an employee spotlight feature. If you’d like to take a look at our newsletter archive, use this link.

The auto-responder shouldn’t be long but you should get across at least the following:

1. A thank you and welcome.
2. A content preview and a frequency reminder.
3. One other piece of content the user can take action on.

Of course, this was just one example. If you’re a retailer you might have a special coupon in the auto-responder; there are a variety of possibilities.

Ready to put an auto-responder on your forms? Here’s what to do. In the Form Wizard section of Libraries and Tools, click the Manage Forms link. Find the form you want to modify in the list of forms and from the Action menu all the way to the right choose ‘Create Auto-Responder.’ From there you be able to use any of the basic mail creation methods to make the auto-responder (template, webpage, file upload, scratch).

If you have any questions about auto-responders or want to discuss your situation individually, drop me a line at dnielsen@reachmail.com

It’s a pretty safe bet that at some point all new ReachMail clients ask me, ‘How does ReachMail track opens?’

Well here’s the deal; opens, or ‘reads,’ if you prefer, are tracked using a unique image that’s appended to the end of every outbound email. This images is small (1px X 1px) and transparent and unique amongst users and campaigns. That is to say each campaign that goes out has a unique image generated for each user that the campaign is delivered to. When a user loads the images in a mail a request is made of our servers to deliver the image to the user and at that point we record an ‘open.’

Re-read that last sentence. Notice I said ‘loads the images,’ not ‘opens the mail,’ not ‘loads it in the preview pane, just ‘loads the images.’ Loading images in the mail is the only action that will record an open. There’s simply no way of knowing if a recipient double-clicks a mail to open it in a new window or scans it in the preview pane. All those actions happen locally at the user level, we’ve got no way of tracking those actions. All we can do is make note of a user requesting information from us and so we track that as an open.

I know, now you’re probably thinking that opens are a flawed measurement and you’ll never pay attention to them again. Hold on a minute though. Try to think of opens as a gauge of perception rather than an isolated metric. We’ve talked about perception in this blog before and of how to increase open rates and click rates by sending mail perceived as valuable. Well, if someone takes the time to download your images, they perceive some value in your mail and that’s what you want to know. It’s not so much that they’re loading the images, it’s about why they’re loading the images.

So the next logical question is ‘What’s the margin for error in the open report?’ Good question. The fact is, there’s really no way of knowing. We can’t track any actions without the user taking any action, so though there may be people who read the mail word for word, if they never load the images, we’ll never know. Again, don’t dwell on the people who aren’t being recorded, try to view the opens as a measure of how the mail is perceived. Opens won’t increase perception, perception will increase opens.

We’ve made an update to ReachMail’s reporting capabilities and now it’s even easier to see how your mailings stack up against each other.

If you’re familiar with the ‘Compare Mailings’ report you know that in the past you’ve always had the ability to look at the 25 most recent campaigns in a group and compare their open rates, bounces and opt-outs. We’ve expanded that ability and it’s now possible to compare multiple mailings across multiple groups.

The old group compare function is still there but now you’ll notice a second tab, ‘Recent Mailings.’ In that tab you can select any number of mailings you like and quickly compare their statistics. Within the comparison report you can quickly grab the open or bounces from the delivery or jump to a campaigns individual report.

Head on over to the Reports tab and click on the Compare Mailings link to check it out.