I took a few days to do some other work and get a clear head before tackling this again. Here’s where things stand currently:
Problem #1 Producing The Link - This is still mostly a problem. In fact, I believe it is the root of the problem. I created a mostly manual process to produce the link. The link looks identical to a real automated link that would come from the campaign. The fundamental difference is in the database. There is a field called “target_tracker_key” that gets a null value with the links I made. The result is like Schrodinger’s cat. It both works and fails at the same time.
Problem #2 Consuming The Link - Again, I currently have it both working and failing at the same time. When a link is clicked, the correct campaign knows and correctly registers which link was clicked. (I’m using 3 different links in the same email for testing.) That part is a win. The problem however stems from the link generation. Instead of showing each new person that has clicked it, the system adds hits to the test user that I used to generate the link.
If I send the email through the campaign manually as the system is setup to do, it does show each user separated as they should be. This leads me to believe that consumption is NOT an actual problem but is in fact a symptom of problem #1. For now, let’s explore #1 as if there is no #2 as I feel that will correct itself.
How I produce the link:
Step 1 - Create the newsletter campaign.
Step 2 - Create the 3 target lists.
Step 3 - Create the test target and add to the primary non test target list.
Step 4 - Create the email template and tracking links.
Step 5 - Send the campaign email.
Step 6 - Copy the URL from the received email.
Step 7 - Create the Webform and add to website.
Step 8 - Create a workflow
Step 9 - The workflow needs to grab all new leads brought in by the form using the matching campaign field as the condition. Then it modifies the record to add the ID of the incoming lead to a specified field. In this case I used department. Finally, it send an email. In that action, I edit the template to have the copied url from step 6 with 1 exception. I remove the identifier and replace it with the department field variable.
By using the new lead ID as the identifier, I can make sure each lead gets a unique tracking link.
I’m sure you’ll agree that this method is crap and can be done much more efficiently.
In a better world, Here’s how this should go:
Step 1 - Create the campaign.
Step 2 - Create the workflow. In the workflow where the email template is made, I would like to have the create tracking links module that is currently in the campaign creation area and links should use id as the identifier.
I think this plan would require the least amount of modifying to the core code.
In a perfect world…
The webform should collect the lead and add it to the target list for the campaign the webform was made for. Then they should get the email from that campaign automatically without the need for all these crazy manual actions.
That’s of course not taking into account that campaigns should consist of a full email sequence and not just one. This software would be much more widely used if it flowed like the real crms out there. It’s got most of the features, just not in the right order.