Anybody who's worked in a cubicle is familiar the Outlook Request Read Receipt—that horrid popup that demands you confirm you have indeed read (and summarily deleted) the TPS report Ted from accounting had sent out. Now, Tout, a new email tracking app, does the same. Huzzah?
Tout is pretty straight forward. Compose and send a message through the Tout app and you can immediately check as to which of your recipients have read it using the tracking suite. It also records any links followed from within the message.
The company is keeping its actual tracking method a secret, though I can't imagine them being that much different from iContact's or MovableInk's. It is available on the iPhone and online through the Tout website and as a gmail plugin. Any way you access it, this is the sort of feedback that marketers dream of—hard, accurate numbers providing reliable stats on a campaign's performance. Get ready for your spam to become a whole lot more accurate. [Tout via Business Insider]