The company I work with sends out 25,000 emails a month to prospects and 500 emails a month to those who have inquired about our products. Those who respond to the emails click a link which sends them to our website where they fill in information regarding their practice and the product samples they would like.

At this point, we use an outside vendor to send out our emails. (I do the find in FileMaker and export the email addresses to excel). When someone receives an email and goes to our website the information is logged into a separate vendor's database. When someone simply opens or deletes the email, this information also goes into the vendor's database. We go through and manually enter the information into FileMaker. I need to automate the manual aspects of this process by somehow importing the information into FileMaker.

The outside vendor we use for our emailing uses a database that can work with excel. Do I need to save the info. in excel and then import into FileMaker each time I want an update? Is there an email vendor that works directly with FileMaker? What is the best way to work these two aspects together so that I can get the tracking information into FileMaker in as close to real time as possible?

this really depends on your vendor and what they want to use. Most of the time any log or traking of emails will not have anything to do with FM unless it is a custom develpment that does fm import/export of dumps....again, anythign from email realted will tend to be either text or csv file.

But, what is the big deal...just write a little script that will import file that your vendor sends you....no matter what format it may be.

All the best!