A lot of folks looking into Wild Apricot for their association’s web site CMS needs do not realize that it can also provide tracking statistics for emails sent through Wild Apricot. Stats are maintained on the individual contact record AND the email campaign. Tracked items include:
- Opens (with specifics of who opened)
- Links clicked with email (with specifics of who clicked what link)
- Failures to Deliver with reasons for such failure
You can also search through your contact or membership database to find out which records have failed email deliveries.
Admittedly, the email tool, both in design and in statistical analysis, isn’t as sophisticated as offerings from companies that have been built specifically for those purposes, such as Constant Contact and MailChimp. But, like every item in the Wild Apricot offering, it has evolved and improved over time and at there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. Templates are much easier to manage in Wild Apricot than they used to be. You can design for purposes of desktop, tablet or mobile.
The big advantage is that the delivery history is attached to the contact/member record. You can identify the members that may be tuning out of your emails. You can identify members who no longer have valid email addresses so you can make a different effort to get that information updated before they have to renew or they miss an event. You can keep the records attached to the member or prospective member records for years in one easy place.
Here’s the key, though – you need to click the Enable open & link tracking in system emails box in Organization Details. This way you won’t have to remember to do this before any email campaign, and you can track the automated emails as well. Even if you only use Wild Apricot for system emails of invoices and renewal notices and the like – turn this on. More information is always better.