Tracking and Analyzing Emails Using Webhooks

Jun 4, 2017 · 1 minute read

Our application is driven by calls to action delivered to project backers via email. We send ~2 million emails a month with 98%+ deliverability.

Given the important role email plays in our business, we wanted to have better technical and behavioral insights into what was going on with our sent emails. We wanted to know more about our email at the project and backer level as well as what kind of impacts our emails have on conversion rates. Here are some of the steps we took to get a better picture.

Webhooks vs on-the-fly querying

We use Mailgun for sending email. Their platform provides two main ways to understand what your email is doing:

HTTP APIs with rolled up statistics

Event-based webhooks We weren’t sure of our use cases for the data yet, so we decided that storing the data in our database would be the most flexible path forward.

Sending headers via ActionMailer callbacks

We instrumented the mailers of interest to include additional SMTP headers including the backer_id and project_id. ActionMailer callbacks allowed us a convenient hook into the email-sending lifecycle that looks like the below wrapper.

Read more on BackerKit’s blog.