someone help... probably need a php programmer in here.
 

I'm in need of a way to track referrals to my email newsletter.

I want to run a contest, where the members refer friends to the website. When the friends join the newsletter, the member gets credit.

Ultimately, I need to track referrals and completed joins, and I don't want to make people sign up or register to participate - they are already on my email list, so they should be able to simply forward the email to their contacts.

I'm using aweber and the site runs on wordpress... any ideas?

(myfreepaysite comes to mind. Affiliates promote "http://www.myfreepaysite.com?aid=trackingid" and all submissions are tracked, along with completed signups, etc.

If I had a custom php page, I could tell my users to forward the email, which would contain a link like this: http://www.mysite.com/refer-contest.php?referid={[email protected]}. aweber allows me to use custom inputs...

meh. Help.)

So my email will need to look like this:

=============
Hi member!

This is the email! Simply forward this to your friends, tell them to click this link, and you'll be working towards winning this contest! Here's the link they need to click:

http://www.mysite.com/contest.php?referral={user-email}

===============================

Make sense?

Si? No?

A simple mail merge with Excel and Word?
Having all the users in an Excel list, and then move over to Word, design your email and then do Mailings > Mail Merge.

Read up on it a bit, but that's exactly what you want. There are also guides and walk throughs inside Word on how to do it. Have a look at it!

How would that track referrals?

Seems like the first issue would be determining if/how aweber supports dynamic tags in your email newsletter.

For example, when creating a new message for mass sending, do you have any tags available for placement in the message that will be replaced for each subscriber when the message is sent? Maybe [EMAIL] would be replaced by each email, etc..

yes, that is available. I can give a link like this:

http://www.mysite.com/referal.php?id="useremail"

then on that page the refered person can sign up.

If I am collecting info from those attempts, I should be able to sort through the referral email ids. if I was able to sort them via sql or excel or other, to see which id's sent the most referals, and then manually verify that the attempted referrals actually confirmed with aweber.

Obviously I need help clarifying this process... it's hard to explain something when you don't understand how it actually works. :D

Gotcha, sounds like you are on the right track.

Your next step would be to create the database on your server to store the referral information. In the simplest case, your database table would contain columns along the lines of "RefID", "RefCount", "JoinCount". When the referral link is initially visited, the visit would be added to "RefCount". After the visitor signs up, you would increment the "JoinCount". In the end, you would have a database containing the referrer IDs, the number of people referred to the signup, and the actual number of signups processed.

There are additional tracking features and checks you may wish to implement, but hopefully this gets you started:thumbsup

Actually, that does piece it together for me a little better. Aweber allows me to specify a "success" page, and it also allows me to create custom fields in the join form. If one of my custom fields sent the info to a database, and then the success page tracked the information to the same database, should work perfectly!

So I need someone with sql and php coding knowledge. I am willing to pay, who can help me here?

daybump. Money offered here.

project closed. Thanks :thumbsup

Oh it's closed? I guess no point replying here then.