Tracking Email Results with ExactTarget for Appexchange

About Email Send Results

Note the following about the ExactTarget Email Results:

• Undeliverables: The figures shown for undeliverable emails may not be final until as many as five days after the delivery, as remote email servers may take that long to return undelivered emails.
• Unsubscribes: The figures shown for recipients who unsubscribe may continue to rise for some time after the delivery, as recipients may not unsubscribe immediately after receiving the email.
• Email opens: The figures shown for number of emails opened reflect only those recipients who received the HTML version of the email, not recipients who received a text version.
• Click-throughs: Only links created through the hyperlink functionality in the content area text editor are tracked.

How To View the Tracking Results of Emails Sent to Individual Leads or Contacts

You can track a Lead or Contact's activities with ExactTarget emails sent via the integration on the Individual Email Results section of the Lead or Contact detail page. This section contains all ExactTarget emails sent to the Lead or Contact that fall into one of these two categories:

1. The email was sent directly to the Lead or Contact via the Send ExactTarget Email link on the Lead or Contact detail page.
2. The Lead or Contact was included in the Campaign or Report to which the email was sent, and the Individual Tracking Results Populated check box was selected at the time of the send.

If the Individual Tracking Results Populated check box was not selected for the Campaign or Report send, then the email will not be listed in the Individual Email Results section. See How To View Tracking Results for Emails Sent to Campaigns and Reports for information about how to see the results of such a send.

Tracking data is also recorded in the ExactTarget application. If you need to view information on hard or soft bounces, you can open the ExactTarget application and open the tracking information for that particular email send. Salesforce displays only total bounce information.

Accessing the Individual Email Results

Each Lead and Contact detail page contains an Individual Email Results section, where you can track the results of emails sent to this Lead or Contact.

Click the hyperlinked email name to view the Individual Email Result detail page.

NOTE: To protect the integrity of your tracking data, do not use the Edit action to open the result detail page.  

Understanding the Result Details

The Individual Email Result detail page shows you the essential data about the email send as well as the Lead or Contact's activities with the email.

The following list describes the data on this page.  First, take a look at the Individual Email Result Detail section:

• Email Name - The name of the email that was sent.  The email name is one of the email properties that you can view and edit from within the ExactTarget application.
• From Name - The name displayed to the Lead or Contact in the email's From information.
• From Address - The email address displayed to the Lead or Contact in the email's "from" information.
• Subject Line - The subject line displayed to the Lead or Contact in the email, including any personalized substitution strings.
• Date Sent - The date and time when the email was sent.
• Opened - A check box indicating whether or not the Lead or Contact opened the email. Whether or not the Lead or Contact opened the email can be ascertained only for those recipients who received the HTML version of the email, not those who received a text version.
• Lead and Contact - If you accessed these results from a lead detail page, the lead's name is shown in the Lead field. If you accessed these results from a contact detail page, the contact's name is shown in the Contact field.
• Campaign and Report - If the Lead or Contact received this email as part of a mass email sent to a Campaign, the name of the Campaign is shown in the Campaign field.  If the Lead or Contact received this email as part of a mass email sent to a Report, the name of the Report is shown in the Report field.  If both the Campaign and Report fields are blank, this email was sent to the Lead or Contact individually, through the Send ExactTarget Email link on the Lead or Contact detail page.
  
  If the email was sent as part of a single Campaign or Report, the results display the Campaign ID. If you send the email as part of several Reports or Campaigns, the Campaign ID remains blank.

Now, take a look at the Delivery Statistics section:

• Date Opened - The date and time when the Lead or Contact last opened the email. Whether or not the Lead or Contact opened the email can be ascertained only for those recipients who received the HTML version of the email, not those who received a text version.
• Number of Total Clicks - This field reflects the total number of times that the Lead or Contact clicked links in the email. This Number of Total Clicks field counts every click and does not filter out repeated clicks of the same link.
• Number of Unique Clicks - This field reflects the total number of times that the Lead or Contact clicked links in the email. The Number of Unique Clicks field counts each link only once. This value does not include repeat clicks of the same link, which are included in the Number of Total Clicks.
• Date Unsubscribed - If the Lead or Contact unsubscribed by using the unsubscribe link in this email, this field shows the date on which that action occurred.
• Date Bounced - If the email bounced, this field shows the date of the bounce.

Now, take a look at the Individual Result Actions section. Click the View Sent Email link to see the email as it was sent to the Lead or Contact, with all personalization intact.

Now, take a look at the Link Details section.

• Link Name - The name or alias defined for each tracked link in the email. Click the hyperlinked link name to open the link detail page, where you can see the number of unique clicks.
• URL - The actual address of each tracked link. Click the URL to open a new browser window that jumps to that address.
• Last Clicked - Date and time when the Lead or Contact last clicked this link.
• Number of Total Clicks - The number of times that the Lead or Contact clicked this link in the email.

Viewing the Sent Email

To see the email in the way that it was sent (with all personalization intact), click the View Sent Email link in the middle of the email result detail page.

Deleting Result Details

ExactTarget recommends that you do not delete the Individual Email Result record from a Lead or Contact detail page.  Doing so will prevent the ExactTarget application from updating the record with most recent Lead or Contact activity.

To reclaim storage space, you can use the ExactTarget interface to delete data that ExactTarget for Appexchange has stored in your Salesforce database. This process also deletes the data from the ExactTarget database by marking it as inactive, which prevents problems with ExactTarget trying to update individually deleted records. Your user must be configured with the Administrative Data Management permission in order for you to use this feature.

Storage of Tracking Data

Whenever an email is sent to a Lead, Contact, Campaign(s), or Report(s), ExactTarget logs into your Salesforce database to create the email result record(s), including Individual Email Results, Links Details, and Email Results. To save space in your Salesforce database, the system creates a Link Detail Object only for those links in an email that a Lead or Contact clicks.

Data in the ExactTarget Application versus Salesforce

All of your email send results are available both in the ExactTarget application and in Salesforce. You'll see the following differences in these two locations:

• Sending to multiple Campaigns: When you send a single email to multiple Campaigns, the results in Salesforce are shown as Email Results only for the first campaign included in the send. In the ExactTarget application, you'll see a single set of results for the entire send.
• Data integrity: The email results displayed in the ExactTarget application cannot be edited. If you suspect that a Salesforce user has edited the email results displayed in Salesforce, log in to the ExactTarget application to see the true results.

Forward to a Friend Feature

Follow these steps to utilize the Forward to a Friend feature in the ExactTarget integration with Salesforce:

1. Send an ExactTarget email that includes a Forward to a Friend link to a Lead or Contact.
2. The Lead or Contact uses the Forward to a Friend link to send the email to another recipient.
3. The other recipient opts in to your mail list.  
4. The new recipient is added to your special Forward to a Friend list in ExactTarget. The default list is called Forward-to-a-Friend Subscriber List; however, your administrator may have chosen a different list in your ExactTarget setup.
5. If you want to add the members of the Forward to a Friend list to your Salesforce database, you can export the list from ExactTarget and then import it into Salesforce.  The records are not automatically added to Salesforce.