How to Track Clicks in Your Email-Newsletter? and How to Track Newsletter Open Rates?
If you use a service like CampaignMonitor or MailChimp (I believe) you get to view all kinds of stats like that.
I can confirm this, you certainly do!
Services like MailChimp, Aweber, Vertical Response or Campaign Monitor provide this service but if you rather go the only-free route, you can use Google Analytics.
In addition to that, you can use a specialized software/service such as LinkTrackr.
In this cases, what you do is to create an url with additional parameters that will be used by the tracking software to know what’s going on.
So let’s say that I want to know who clicked to view my website: www.who-knows-the-name-of-my-site.com.
In my e-mail, I would not add a link that goes to this URL but something more like http;//www.who-knows-the-name-of-my-site.com/?utm_source=Whatevern&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Everybody-knows-who-I-am-and-I-am-great-and-cool
How do I know the name of the parameters and their corresponding values? Because these e-mail analysis software have a took to build my links the right way. In the case of Google Analytics, it is called url builder (original, eh? :p)
so what does CampaignMonitor do? thanks
It is a mass mailer service to do e-mail campaigns, newsletters, etc. Their servers are monitored and configured to send mails fast and to avoid black lists (a server in a black lists has problems since the e-mails will unlikely reach their destination) and free your own resources for faster hosting or whatever. Additionally, it tracks the clicks and results of your campaigns, gives you free e-mail templates, etc.
In addition to what molona said, you can also set up autoresponders, and you can set up mailing lists and place a form on your site so that people can sign up to a newsletter and automatically be added to the mailing list. etc…
Do these email marketing services have the email address in their database or the user will have to give them the email addresses to email?
They keep them stored in their own database.