Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Emails Sent Tracking

Bill & Pay includes tools to track the delivery of all the emails sent for your business including new invoice notifications, payment due and over due reminders, and payment confirmations.


Email Log


Bill & Pay retains a one month log of all email messages sent to your customers on your behalf. What we log:
  • What customer an email was sent to
  • The customer's email address the email was sent to
  • The date and time and it was sent
  • The subject and content of the email message
  • The invoice file attachment included with the message
Your business may have a need to retain sent email logs for a period of time longer than one month. Please contact customer service to inquire about increasing the duration of email log retention.

View by Customer


To view all of the emails sent to a specific customer go to that customer's page in Bill & Pay and click the "Emails Sent" button.

The Customer Emails Sent page will list all of the emails in your sent email log with the status of the email, the date and time the email was sent, the email address the email was sent to, and the subject of the email.

Click on any of the emails in the Customer Emails Sent list to view the email details. The details page will show you the email message the way it looked to your customer when they received it. If there was an attachment with the email, such as an invoice PDF, then you will also be able to view the file that was attached to the email.

Reporting


You can generate a report of all the emails you have sent in a date range that you specify. Go to Reports and click the "Emails Sent to Customers" report. You can choose the start and end dates for the report along with which email status types you want to include in the report. Possible statuses are sent, opened, and error.

The report that is generated will list all of the emails sent in the selected date range with the email status, date and time sent, the email address it was sent to, the customer the email was sent to, and the email's subject.

A great use for the emails sent report is to generate a report of all the emails you sent in the last month that have a status of "Error". This will give you a list of customers that have email addresses that you are unable to delivery messages to. You can use the report is a list of customers to contact to get an updated email from. Keeping your customer email list up-to-date and accurate will help improve your cash flow.

Email Status


There are three possible email statuses:
  1. Sent - Bill & Pay has sent the email for delivery. If the email can not be delivered it will move from the Sent status to the Error status.
  2. Opened - The customer opened the email. You can use this status to verify that your customer received the email and looked at it. Click on a sent email to view it in detail to see the date and time the customer first opened the email.
  3. Error - The email could not be delivered. Click on an email with an error to view a detailed explanation of why it could not be delivered. The most common reason for this is trying to send an email to an address that is not valid.

How the Opened Status Works


Bill & Pay includes images in the emails we send to your customers. When your customer looks at the email and the images in the email are loaded it notifies our server that they are reading the email message. This makes it possible for us to mark the email as opened and know the date and time when the customer first opened it.

Many email readers, including most email readers on mobile devices, automatically load images when reading email messages. Customers that use one of these email readers will have emails you send them marked as 'Opened' when they read them. Some email readers, such as Outlook, do not load images by default as a privacy protection for the user. Emails to these customers will remain in a "Sent" status unless the customer adds your business email address you send emails from to their "Safe Sender" list or they tell their email reader to load images for the email message they are reading.

This means that an email status of "Opened" indicates your customer has opened your email message. However, a status of "Sent" means it was sent to them and they may or may not have opened it.

Longer Email Retention


By default, email history is stored in Bill & Pay for the past 30 days. Some businesses may be required to keep a record of messages sent to customers for regulatory reasons. If this is the case for your business, contact customer service to increase the sent email log retention period for your business. We retain a record of what your email looked like at the time it was delivered. Even if an invoice is modified at some point after an email is sent, we retain a record of how that invoice appeared at the time the email was sent.

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