Tracking email responses

Question

What is the best way of tracking responses for email campaigns? I was thinking on adding something to the reply-to field of the email (for example luqita+campaigns@stackoverflow.com), but I'm not sure if there is something more neat that could avoid this?

I thought about headers too, but it's important to note that the address luqita@stackoverflow.com would send many different campaigns, and the 'in-reply-to' header info would not be useful then to differentiate (while using luqita+campaign1 or luqita+campaign2 could)

What can I do?

Answer 1

So you want to be able to execute some logic when someone replies to an email you have sent through SendGrid? If you have access to change the MX record of the domain of the email address at which you want to receive the replies, you could use SG's Parse API to get a POST request to a script whenever email is receive at the address.

I think you would indeed have to set a magic reply-to address for each campaign. This seems like a perfectly fine solution; it's also how SG itself tracks bounces - it sets the return-path to something like bounces+{attempted-recipient-email}@sendgrid.com. Then examine the 'to' parameter of the POST notification you receive to know which campaign the reply is associated with.

Answer 2

When you say "tracking responses", do you mean that you expect users will reply to the Email, or do you mean that they'll click on a link in the Email and interact with a web site?

SendGrid obviously offers click tracking and open tracking, and you can set up to 10 different categories for tracking campaign stats and see delivery/bounces/opens/clicks/etc based on those categories. They also have a Google Analytics plugin that can feed back some analytics data to Google. And as @LinusR mentioned in his answer, the SendGrid Parse API can be set up in a way that reply Emails can get parsed and posted back to your site.

If the user will be interacting with your web site, you can use the "unique args" setup at SendGrid to set a unique string/hash to append to any URLs that can help identify a particular user, campaign, or whatever else you want to track.