[Vtigercrm-developers] email tracking and list enforcement

Matthew Brichacek mmbrich at fosslabs.com
Tue May 23 11:09:47 PDT 2006


Hello All,

I'll be getting ready to drop the email tracking capabilities into 5.x
soon and I would like peoples opinions on list management...

In our current deployment we've created an abstracted list management
system called the "Campaigns" module.. Imagine that :).  Within this
module I track all lists by the parent_id and not by entity.  This is
because some of our customers are large telemarketing organizations and
wanted to be able to harvest lists from their leads DB and re-call them
even if they had a previous do-not-call flag set from another campaign.
There are other good reasons for list management too, I'll explain more
bellow.

I tied the list management into the custom views module, IE: if you
create a custom view called "List 1" you will have a campaign created
with a parent id == customviewid of List 1.  The parent is where the
tracking begins at so that if the list is simply duplicated (say for
another newsletter) then the unsub list is maintained.  If a new custom
view is created, the parent_id is set to the new customviewid for the
new campaign and the list unsubs are reset.

I know that is confusing but it enforces list management and not at the
entity level so it still allows for harvesting new lists from the db.  
Here is a simple scenario of how it works:
1) I create a custom view called "sales list" and click the "Add to
Campaigns" checkbox and save it.
2) A new campaign with a subject of "Initial list creation" is created
with a parent_id == cvid of "Sales List"
3) Set the campaign type == "Email" and the rest of the fields to
whatever I want and save
4) New button appears in Campaign DetaiView for "Create/Edit Email" and
"Bulk Mail".  I create an email and mail it.

Now, suppose one of my customers unsubs from this list.  He won't ever
be emailed from the "Sales List" or any of the children campaigns that
are created from it.  However, if I go create a "Newsletter List" custom
view and add it to the campaigns that customer _will_ be mailed again.
Using the regular contactdetails.emailoptout would have stopped that
customer from getting the newsletter list and is another good reason for
list management instead of entity management for campaigns.

So, what do you think?  Far too complicated?  Would you like to see a
stricter set of unsub management rules?  Or do you think this mix is
just right?

If you need further explanation just say so.

Matt




More information about the vtigercrm-developers mailing list