May 2016

How does email tracking work with G Merge?

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With G Merge, all the emails you send are tracked by default. You know instantly when they are opened.

How does email tracking work? Wizy.io embeds an invisible image inside your email. The image is hosted on Wizy.io’s servers, so we can log each instance that the image is loaded. Each time this happens, we read it as the email being opened. This includes instances when the email was opened on mobile.

Why are certain emails marked as not opened, when I know they have been? Email tracking will work as long as the recipient has chosen to show images by default when he opens his email. Remember that tracking works with an invisible image. If the recipient has set his email client to hide images, tracking will not work. Most email clients do not block images by default, though, so you will encounter this with just a small percentage of your recipients, if at all.

One other thing: You must send to a real email address for tracking to work. Emails that go to a service, for example, are not “opened” in the real sense of the word. That means the invisible image is not loaded. For example, if you send a message to support@wizy.io, it will go to a customer service software, and not an inbox. In this case, tracking will not work. All email tracking applications have this limitation.

What about link tracking? As with tracking for the opening of emails, the links go through our servers. We transform the links so that it passes through our servers first before redirecting it to the actual link. Every time the link is clicked, we log it. The information is then transmitted to you.

If you haven’t tried this free email productivity tool for Gmail yet, install G Merge from the G Suite Marketplace right now.

Gino TriaGino Tria is a problem solver, an engineer, a teacher, and a student of entrepreneurship. He has been building and breaking software since he was a kid. Nowadays, as Wizy.io’s CPO and head of the product development team, Gino is responsible for all technical decisions and the architecture of the company’s products that are built on top of the Google Cloud Platform.

Laurent GasserHow does email tracking work with G Merge?
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How to set parallel and conditional reviewers in Form Workflow Plus

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Let’s talk about the reviewers in your workflow. Going back to the Human Resources example from our last blog post, you can see that the Form Workflow add-on is very easy to use if you have one reviewer.

But what if you have several? For example, if you have more than one supervisor who can give approval to day-off requests. In this case, you’ll be setting up a process called parallel validation.

parallel reviewers

What you do is you click the blue Setup reviewer(s) button on the sidebar. This will open a pop-up window. Here, you will write the email addresses of all your supervisors. Every time somebody submits a day-off request on Google Forms, all the supervisors will receive an email asking for validation. As soon as one of them acts on it (approves it, declines it, puts it on hold, or sends it back to the requestor), the request is closed to the others.

Now what if you want certain requests to go to one supervisor and other requests to go to another supervisor? For example, you want all types of day-off requests to go to Supervisor A  except vacation leaves. Those you want to go to Supervisor B. It’s time to set up a conditional validation process.

default

When you click on the Setup reviewer(s) button, you get the pop-up above. You will see the “default” line. Form Workflow will always have this, and the email address initially displayed will always be yours.

If you want Supervisor A to approve most day-off requests, you will type his email address here, to replace your own.

conditional reviewer

Now you want Supervisor B to approve vacation requests. What you do is you set up your Criteria (in this case “Type,” which the add-on detects from the spreadsheet column names), your operator (“Equal To”), and the Row Content. Here you put “Vacation.”

Every time somebody submits a Google form asking for a leave of type “Vacation,” this will be logged on the spreadsheet, and the add-on will take care of sending this particular request to Supervisor B.

Install Form Workflow Plus from the G Suite Marketplace now and try it for 2 weeks for free!

team-imgWizy.io’s customer success director Apol Massebieau has been a newspaper journalist, magazine editor, TV show host/producer, essay and fiction writer, and toy designer. She was an early adopter of Etsy and continues being fascinated by how small businesses thrive online.

Apol MassebieauHow to set parallel and conditional reviewers in Form Workflow Plus
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How to validate a workflow with Google Forms

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You have a workflow in your organization that requires a request being submitted by one person, and approval being given by another. Say, you’re in Human Resources and you need to manage day-off requests. Our Form Workflow add-on is a great tool to help you do this.

Taking the HR example, the Google Sheets add-on will let an employee submit a day-off request through Google Forms. From there, it goes directly to a supervisor’s email for approval. You keep all the results logged in your spreadsheet. Our add-on even gives you a summary of everything going on. All seamless and easy!

To begin, you start Form Workflow from the add-on menu of your Google spreadsheet. Link a form to your spreadsheet by clicking the Create button in your add-on sidebar. To modify the form, go to Form in the top menu, then choose Edit Form.

create form steps

The next step is to determine your reviewer, or the person you want to validate the day-off request. Click the blue Setup Reviewers button, and enter the email address of your supervisor. You can have more than two reviewers, so go ahead and enter the email addresses of two or more supervisors. Once one of them acts on the request, it is considered done.

If you want another person to validate the request after a supervisor approves it, tick the 2nd Validation Step box in your sidebar. Enter the email address of the second reviewer here.

setup reviewer 1
2nd validation workflow

Going to the Advanced tab of Form Workflow will give you some more options. Tick the appropriate boxes if you  want your supervisor to be able to put a request on hold or send it back to the person making the request. Take note that for the latter option to work, you have to set up the Requestor Email box.

advanced tab

Remember to switch on the workflow in your sidebar. Once you do this, on each submission of the Day-off Requests form, the add-on will send an email to a supervisor asking for approval. (The Email Template area in the Advanced tab lets you personalize the email sent to the supervisor.)

activated ON

In this email, there will be a validation module, asking the supervisor to act on the request. In addition to Approve and Decline, reviewers have the two additional choices that you set up in the Advanced tab. They can put the request on hold, or send it back to the requestor.

validation module 1

How do you keep track of your workflows? Click on the Reports tab. It will give you a tally of all the processes, both done with and ongoing.

fw - reports all

We think you’ll agree that Form Workflow is a super-charged business tool! If you haven’t tried it yet, get Form Workflow here.

 

team-imgWizy.io’s customer success director Apol Massebieau has been a newspaper journalist, magazine editor, TV show host/producer, essay and fiction writer, and toy designer. She was an early adopter of Etsy and continues being fascinated by how small businesses thrive online.

Apol MassebieauHow to validate a workflow with Google Forms
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