New Tool Helps You Find Out Which Email Clients Your Recipients Are Using

I got an email yesterday about a new tool developped by the folks behind Litmus (a tool that shows you what your email will look like in different browsers). The new tool is called Fingerprint and it shows you which email clients your readers are using. I tried it out when I was sending out the newsletter for the Email Marketer's Club yesterday and I was very impressed with the results.

Basically what happens is that you get a piece of code (an image tag) to add to your email and about an hour after sending your campaign you get to see the first results.

I would advise everyone to try it out to get a better idea of which email clients you should be designing your emails for. Is Lotus Notes used by a big part of your audience? Do they use version 6 or 8? Do they use Gmail in Firefox or in Internet Explorer? Do they view your email on their iPhone...

Drop everything you're doing and check it out now! Really. I'm not kidding.

And in case you're wondering: I didn't get paid to post this. I really believe in this product and I think they are selling it way too cheap, so you want to get in and start using it before they realize what goldmine they are sitting on ;-)

Comments

[Robert Barclay]

Tamara,
Actually I'm afraid that the results would not really be usefully extrapolable (is that a word?) beyond the subset of your list who you recorded opens for. The simple reason for this is that it is at least in large part your email client and its abilities which determine whether or not images are retrieved so this technology and opens both give you insight into the same subset of your list.
Still an interesting piece of data, and potentially helpful when working on the design of an email.

[Neil]

WOW... this is amazing! This is exactly what i've been looking for...

Thanks for posting this.

[Tamara Gielen]

Hi SAM, it uses an image to track email clients, so if images are not downloaded the client isn't tracked. However, if you have an open rate of let's say 30% you can extrapolate that information to the rest of your list. It's not perfect, but IMHO it's still a BIG improvement over having no information at all.

[SAM]

Looks like they use "opens" to determine the email clients? If so, then these results would be severely flawed if you wanted to know the profile of your list. It will only show you the profile of your HTML opens. And that explains why the iPhone gets more coverage than Hotmail!

Still a cool app, but must be sure to use it in the correct context.

THANKS.

SAM

[Tamara Gielen]

Thanks Paul!

[Paul Farnell]

Thanks very much for the review Tamara!

Regarding the Thunderbird results, it was me that spoke with Steffen earlier today. We've actually re-created Tamara's statistics, with our updated algorithm.

If you check the results again, you'll see there is 5% penetration of Thunderbird overall on her list:
http://fingerprintapp.com/pub/b21017e107799055

[Steffen]

I was wondering about Thunderbird as well, so after registering with them I was contacted by a very helpful and nice guy from Fingerprintapp and I asked him about TB. He told me they implemented Thunderbird tracking after Tamara's test (she was using it before official launch). They say it can track Thunderbird now as well, even the version.
I wonder how they do this...

Best
Steffen

[Martin van den Berg]

Very interesting indeed.
In the Excel with test restults there's no listing for Thunderbird. So at least my reading wasn't counted. Perhaps because it uses the img-tag?