A few weeks back we began a concerted effort to improve the quality of our merchant email tools. You may have already seen the first change in our spam analysis tool, and just this week we’ve taken a few other changes live.
First, we’ve added message tracking capabilities to the affiliate emails you send. This means that you can view whether or not a message was actually delivered to an affiliate’s email address, or if it was “bounced” back by the affiliate’s mail server as a bad email address. Additionally, if you send messages with an HTML component you gain the benefit of being able to see whether or not affiliates are actually opening your message. This tracking information is available as a report, so:
- Login and click on ‘Reports’ from the main menu.
- Choose ‘Affiliate Email Summary’ from the list of available reports.
- Set the ‘Date’ to ‘This Month’ or some range long enough to encompass your most recent emails to affiliates.
- Click ‘Select Report’ to see the breakdown of information for your email campaigns.
Now, there are some limitations to the above capabilities. For starters, our tracking processes were only finalized on April 21st, so any affiliate emails sent prior to that won’t be able to show any delivery statistics. And obtaining message open information requires the use of an image embedded in your email, so if affiliates don’t view the images in your HTML email they won’t count as having “opened” the message. Because of this it is possible that an affiliate could read a message you sent without being tallied in this report; we suggest you avoid leaving angry voice mails demanding why your emails aren’t being read!
In addition to the tracking changes, we’ve also upgraded our infrastructure to enhance the quality of our email. All of our outgoing email now utilizes both SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validation and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signing. Both of these solutions help mail hosts verify that messages coming from AvantLink servers are not SPAM.
Let us know if you have any questions or comments.
David & AvantLink