Getting a count of unique enquiries between 2 dates?
Hey folks, I'm currently trying to gather info on how many enquiries were sent through my business website between two dates. I thought it was going to be easy as the emails come titled "Get quick quote" and then another form they come titled "service form" but when I arrange by subject, the replies to these emails also show up, so if the same user replies between 3 unique enquiries, it would look like this:
John: Get quick quote Steve: Get quick quote Steve: RE: Get quick quote Mike: Get quick quote Derek: Get quick quote
So if I end up back and forth with one customer, it's going to really distort the true figures.
Would anyone have any suggestions how to gauge this properly?
I just want the number of unique enquiries and unique people who have contacted me through the site, I'm not sure if getting a list of email addresses between certain dates would work as many of these could be existing customers or not actual enquiries through the site.
Any help would be great :)
All Replies (2)
I think you may need a Message Filter and I'd also suggest using the Expression Search/GmailUI addon which has a specific date range tool. It won't be terribly easy but the regular expression search of subject might allow you to eliminate the replies.
I have an "is in my address book" search option in my filters that could help identify unknown and so presumably new correspondents. You may need the FiltaQuilla addon for this.
I'd probably combine this filtering with a Saved Search folder to aggregate the filtered messages into a new virtual folder. This would also have the benefit of making the whole thing reusable; you wouldn't have to set it all up again next time, but just adjust the date range or age of messages to be selected.
I would hope that then if you simply highlighted all the messages the status bar would tell you how many are selected; if not, or if you can't get the filtering to provide a clean summary excluding replies, I'd export the search results as a CSV file and do the tidying-up and counting in a spreadsheet.
The ImportExportTools add-on may be useful with the export to CSV.
If this is something you to want to do regularly then I'd suggest that a database might be a more appropriate tool for a multi valued search such as this. The starting point would probably be to export your messages from Thunderbird to a CSV file, import that into the database and then use its tools to construct the search.
I think the bottom line is this search/filter task may be too complex for Thunderbird's tools by themselves.
Chosen Solution
Wow, thanks a lot for such a helpful reply! I was slowly getting through your suggestions and I started with the Expression Search/Gmail UI addon too and put in a string for what I wanted:
before:2015/12/20 23:59:59 after:2015/01/31 23:59:59 subject:Get Quick Quote!
This is the date range I wanted and this was the subject I was looking for, but it still threw back all the emails with RE: at the start, I was then looking at how could I export the list as you suggested so I could then put it through excel and take out all the RE:'s and count the rest. I went to "Events and tasks" and tried click export but it didn't seem like anything happened, so then I thought maybe I needed to highlight all the emails so I held shift down and selected the top one and then went to the bottom of the list and clicked the last one and before I could even go to try export again, info popped up in the lower pane of the window and said how many conversations it was :)
So it was something like 1581 messages including the "RE" ones and then when I highlighted them all, it showed up as 955 conversations, so I think that's the number I was looking for.
I tried again without the search expression results, just highlighting them when arranged by subject in the regular view and it popped up the same info, although this time it was 952 conversations for some reason, but that discrepancy won't make much difference to the average which is what I'm looking for :)
So really, it was a lot simpler than we both initially thought :)