Know the moment your proposal gets opened

Tracked links inside your proposals, so the open becomes a signal you can act on instead of a thing you wonder about — and the follow-up lands while the prospect is still reading.

When to run it

You send proposals as PDFs or Notion links and then wait blind. You don't know whether the prospect opened it the same afternoon or never at all, so the follow-up goes out on a guessed schedule — usually too late for the warm ones and too pushy for the cold ones.

Why it works

A proposal open is the single strongest buying signal in the deal, and it has a short half-life: the prospect is literally reading your pricing right now. Following up inside that window means your reply lands while the questions are fresh, instead of three days later when the tab is closed. The mechanism is a link the prospect was going to click anyway — no pixel, no tracker script, works inside a PDF.

The play

1. Replace the raw links inside the proposal (the case study, the pricing page, the booking link) with tracked short links.
2. When a click lands, notify yourself immediately — email, Slack, or Discord — with which link and which deal.
3. Follow up personally within the hour. The journey's job is the timing; the message should still be yours.
4. Cap it: one notification per proposal, not one per click.

Ship it with Hogsend

Mint the link with a slug you choose, drop it in the proposal, and let the click event drive the journey. Hogsend's click tracking is first-party — the redirect runs through your own domain, and unfurl bots don't count as opens.

import { days, defineJourney, hours, sendEmail } from "@hogsend/engine";

export const proposalOpened = defineJourney({
  meta: {
    id: "proposal-opened-follow-up",
    trigger: {
      event: "link.clicked",
      where: (b) => b.prop("campaign").eq("proposal"),
    },
    // One heads-up per proposal per week, however many clicks land.
    entryLimit: "once_per_period",
    entryPeriod: days(7),
    suppress: hours(0),
  },
  run: async (user, ctx) => {
    // The "user" here is you — route the alert to the deal owner.
    await sendEmail({
      to: user.email,
      userId: user.id,
      template: "internal/proposal-opened",
      props: user.properties,
    });
  },
});

Vanity links (/l/pricing-acme) and QR codes come from the same link-tracking machinery, so the play covers printed leave-behinds too.

How you'll know

Time-to-first-touch after the open, and reply rate on follow-ups sent inside the window versus your old fixed schedule. The click events and the follow-up sends are both in Hogsend, so the comparison is one funnel — no spreadsheet reconciliation.