Forum Discussion
Send/track email programmatically
Does anyone know of a product/way to track emails in the same way that Salesforce or HubSpot does, but without paying for those expensive platforms? I'm not knocking those platforms, they are very powerful for what they do, but we don't want or need 90% of their functionality. We just want to find a way to track deliveries, bounces, opens, link clicks and replies. Does anyone know of a way to insert this type of tracking on top of Outlook?
I'm not fully aware of how Salesforce or HubSpot work, but here's how I think they're doing it. The opens and link clicks are easy, those are just tracking pixels and formatted URLs with redirects to the actual page. But they also track deliveries, bounces and replies, and I think they must be able to do this because they integrate with Outlook. Meaning, their software is able to communicate with the Exchange server about particular emails, and digest and present that information.
Does anyone know of a platform that integrates with Outlook, or perhaps Exchange, such that I can gather this information in our database without having to have my users migrate onto a new SaaS platform?
Thanks,
Daniel
4 Replies
You can use the Message Trace of Exchange for that which can also be accessed programmatically via PowerShell;
Exchange Online: Get-MessageTrace (ExchangePowerShell) | Microsoft Docs
Exchange On-Premises: Get-MessageTrackingLog (ExchangePowerShell) | Microsoft Docs
Hey Robert. Thanks for the reply. I probably should have been more specific in my first message. The intention is to feed the data on emails back into our CRM. Actually, the intention is to initiate the email from within the CRM, send it through our normal account, and track it. It doesn't look like message trace has the ability to insert tracking pixels into the outgoing email, so it can't track opens or link clicks, which is important to us.
dgajohnsonIf you have a developer at hand it's quite simple, otherwise you can look at Mautic which is an open source platform for email campaigns and has built in tracking features which you could potentially jippo to do what you need.
To do it from within your CRM would probably require a plugin or some custom development, which should be relatively simple tbh
