HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would you pay for this?

6 points by dgunn ↗ HN
Who would pay for an app that allowed you to track the receipt of email?

I'm currently doing some initial market research for a B2B I'm interested in starting. It's in a domain I'm not super familiar with, so I'm reaching out to potential clients to determine what issues problems they have. I plan to email no less than 100 businesses to hopefully lead to maybe 15-20 good quality phone conversations with my potential clients.

The problem is that I have no idea how well I'm doing. I keep a spread sheet of those I've emailed and I'd really like to know when a lead is dead. For example, if I knew a person opened the email three days ago and still hasn't replied, I would feel good about changing their status on my list.

I know some solutions exist, but they're terrible. I've considered making something that would work with a single click while using my gmail web client but I really don't want to if something great is already out there or if I can't get something back from my effort.

So I ask: who here would pay for this? I would. And actually, I'm willing to pay right now if someone has something good.

11 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] thread
dougbarrett
It's a pretty easy thing to get going. I made a 'pixel tracker' that is essentially what is a clear image on a website, but you put it in your email. The image actually runs a process on the server that can increment a number, track IP's, etc. etc. and it will return an image.

For an e-mail, you would want to include a company logo, signature, or something to entice them to "Show all images" because I know if I got an e-mail and there was no image that popped up, I'd think there is something fishy going on.

dgunn
Agreed. I've used px trackers before but I'm not a fan of the work flow. I was thinking of a script in a bookmarklet or something that I click and if I'm in my gmail, it will contact my server for an image id and inject it at the bottom of my email. It would then detect when I click "send" so it could turn on the tracking. If I'm sending 100 emails just to test a market, it would be very worth while to me to spend on this. Especially since the market research may prove that I need a different market.
subhobroto
I am pretty sure you will have more suggestions coming up, but what do you see lacking in "free" offerings like: http://whoreadme.com/

The core concept is akin to pixel tracking done by a lot of companies for their analytics: however in my personal experience, for the specific situation of cold calling you describe, I have had better results with embedding two links into my email along the lines of:

1. "Let me know you are interested"

2. "Let me know you are not interested"

This has worked better than passive pixelling as you are involving the person in the interaction directly instead of guessing what to do.

You give them better control of their decisions.

For example, a lot of email clients do cache pixels and you won't know if it was the client that fired the pixel or the person, but you can control that via a link. IN the native pixelling approach, you could end up cold calling (now over the phone) a person who was not interested in you but you thought so as their email client cached the pixel.

People who see, even in the future, forging (or not) a relation with you will click a link, however busy they are. Those who do not, do not seem to be good leads anyways.

I would love to hear your opinions on this.

dougbarrett
That seems like a pretty cool idea. You could combine the pixel tracking with the "Let me know you are interested" links. You're basically tracking opens & click throughs. You could then get data on who has opened the e-mail w/ imageS? Who has only clicked on a link? Who has done both? This is all pretty standard stuff for email campaign software, but there isn't much out there for emails that are going to be on a more personal, smaller scale.
dgunn 

  This is all pretty standard stuff for email campaign software, but there isn't much out there for emails that are going to be on a more personal, smaller scale.
My point exactly
dgunn
This is actually a great idea. If someone offered something like this, I would expect that link tracking should also be part of it.

My main issue with something like whoreadme is the idea of adding their domain to the email address. It adds clutter to my gmail contacts and it causes any replies to not be grouped as a conversation by gmail.

This was a good idea but I think there are much better ways to achieve this goal.

thomasvendetta
Have you checked out Airtime? airtimehq.com
dgunn
It seems related. They don't articulate very well what they actually do. Any idea?

Seems more like it's marketing focused though I may be able to use it just to get the benefit I'm looking for.

dangrossman
I wouldn't pay for this. The only mails where I care about tracking open rates are programmatically sent (either transactional e-mails from an app, or bulk mails to some kind of newsletter/list). Open tracking is a free side benefit of the platforms that offer transactional and bulk mailing (SendGrid, MailChimp, etc).

I don't care whether my personally sent mails get opened or not because there's no new action I would take if I knew that information. Not being opened is the same as being opened and ignored.

If I wanted my personally sent mails to have open tracking, I'd just point my mail client to Sendgrid's SMTP server and they'd add the tracking pixel to all my mails for me.

You're talking about building a business around what's simply a feature at other existing businesses... and you can't compete on price because it's already free except for large volume clients where they can add more value in other ways.

dgunn
Not necessarily. I'm interested in a simplified work flow. For example, I don't want to point to another smtp. I don't want to create campaigns in mail chimp just to achieve this result. I just want to use my client of choice (gmail) and get feedback as to whether a lead is not worth it or if I should try a different contact method (phone). I would have no interest in using this for normal personal mail. Just business-related issues like market research.

These other services offer this as an add on to their service but I would never be interested in using their apps for this type of communication.

Also, it's good to point out, I'm not interested in building a business around this. I want to pay someone who has.