Using Campaign Monitor to track RSVPs

Published October 03, 2008 by Mathew Patterson

A lot of people use Campaign Monitor to send emails out to their customers for special sales, to organise conferences, parties and events. We often get asked whether Campaign Monitor has some kind of system to record whether people will attend or not.

While Campaign Monitor is not an events management application, it is actually pretty easy to set up your list so you can keep track of people who RSVP to your invitations.

Here's what you will need:

An email that contains your RSVP "Yes" and "No" links
A landing page for the yes / no links to click through to
Two segments, for the 'yes' clickers and the 'no' clickers

All very straightforward. Just setup somewhere on your website a 'thanks for RSVPing' page. If you want to have separate messages for people who say yes, and people who decline, you could have two different URLs.

So your email would contain links like:

With some simple server side PHP or other code, you could just have one page with a parameter to detect yes and no clicks.

Then when you send your email, Campaign Monitor will consider the 'answer=yes' and 'answer=no' portions to make those two separate URLs, and track the separately, which is what makes the whole thing possible.

Your recipients click on whichever link they choose, and then you can separate them into yes and no groups using segments. Just create rules of type Campaign was opened - specific link clicked, select your campaign, and choose the appropriate links.

Screenshot of the segment rule in action

Now you have your two lists of responses. You can export the segment as a list of addresses to use in some other system, and you can send different follow up emails to just the people who have said yes or no.

Easy RSVP tracking with Campaign Monitor!

6 Comments

Posted in: Tips & Resources

6 Comments

Mikael
October 3, 2008 7:36pm

Ok. But if the recipient goes back to the mailing and clicks the same link again or the other link (changes his mind)? If the mailing is forwarded via regular forward function and someone else clicks one of the links? How are these clicks handled?

Mathew Patterson
October 3, 2008 8:51pm

Thanks for your comments Mikael. If they click the same link again, then nothing changes, but of course you may get people changing their minds.

Any clicks from a forwarded campaign show up in the original subscribers name. As I mentioned, if you need bulletproof event handling, Campaign Monitor is not your tool.

For simple RSVP applications though, this is a useful piece of information.
Jason Head
October 4, 2008 12:58am

I send out a meeting announcement every month for Refresh Pittsburgh. This post was one of those “head-slappers” where I am wondering why I never thought to do something like this!

Great idea for basic RSVP management! I think I will try this out for a future announcement!
Wayde Christie
October 5, 2008 5:43pm

*slaps head*

I’ll be using this for our web gathering also. Up until now I had to rely on international services like Upcoming and Facebook to get RSVPs, and they rarely gave us any useful indication of actual numbers.

Thanks for the great tip!
Vince
October 6, 2008 4:23am

Good workaround. Bit I would really like to see a survey builder feature as it would handle this and many other similar situations.
DavidC
October 7, 2008 1:29am

that’s a very useful post, i hadnt thought of doing event confirmation emails with CM, I agree that it will not be a 100% for an event mngmnt system by it does the tric… I agree with Vince that a survey fuil feature would be much welcome, at the moment i am having to use two different solutions : email marketing and online surveys… it would be great to do it all through campaign monitor… cheers

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