Email tracking, or finding out what happens to the emails you send – whether it’s a marketing campaign, transactional email, or message to a client – can provide you with loads of important data. It’s useful for virtually any team that needs to understand their clients’ preferences: marketing, sales, customer service, or product development.
How does it work, what can you learn from it, and how to apply it in your business? You’ll find out in our guide.
How does email tracking work?
We’ll start by learning what actually lies behind email tracking systems. This will help you with finding the best uses of email tracking for your business.
Pixel
So, let’s break down the magic. Your email tracking tool adds a small image – as tiny as a 1×1 pixel – to your message that’s invisible to the recipient. Yet, the server is notified if this image is loaded, meaning that the email containing it has been opened.
Of course, if your recipients have blocked images from auto-loading, you’ll only find out if the message is opened when the picture is manually chosen to load. The email service that the recipient uses will then ask before loading the images.
Tracking links
URL tracking opened a new world of possibilities, including for teams working with email analytics. It’s based on a similarly simple concept: you add labels (called UTM tags) to your basic links in order to differentiate placements. They usually look something like this:
http://yourwebsite.com/your-post-title/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid
You’ll find the UTM tags in the bolded part. As you can see, they contain various pieces of information about your link placement, called parameters: medium, source, campaign, term, and content.
Adding information like UTM tags helps you gain more insights about links in Google Analytics. If you place the same link in various email campaigns and differentiate them with UTM tags, you can observe which campaign brings the best results.
SMTP server
Sending your emails via an SMTP server gives you access to additional email tracking information. You can see the percentages of delivered and opened emails, as well as the numbers of clicks on the links. Also, you can learn about hard and soft bounces, plus how many users mark your messages as SPAM or unsubscribe from your newsletters.
The server can hold information about every single email for a given period – Coresender, for example, saves the data for 60 days. You can preview a timeline of exactly what happens to a message: at what times it is delivered and opened.
Webhooks
Webhooks don’t directly track your emails, but they are an important feature for connecting your email tracking service with your toolbox. If an event that you define takes place (opening an email, say), webhooks send information to your other tools: CRM, Slack channel, email, or anything else you use. Thanks to this solution, you won’t have to check manually to know if something happens.
What can you learn from email tracking?
Email tracking gives you access to various data, but how can you apply it to your business? Let’s find out.
Are your recipients interested in your message?
You won’t be able to answer this question directly without actually asking your target audience, but you can make use of behavioral data. Tools like email tracking give you insights into actions that your recipients take – like opening messages or clicking on the links inside.
Also, you can get into more details to find out what sparks their interest. This way, you can distill the elements that are especially important for your audience and ensure they appear in your messages. Knowing if your readers care most about the topics, specially crafted subject lines, or having a particular section in your newsletter can increase the interest of your audience.
Are there any technical issues?
Email tracking lets you know how your emails perform at regular times. This helps you to spot technical issues before they turn into disasters. Whether it’s about a link that doesn’t work properly or images that don’t display, you can see such problems reflected in your numbers.
Any sudden or abnormal changes in your email results mean you should check for technical issues, besides analyzing your content. This lets you know where you should focus your efforts. Also, by taking a closer look at the situation, you will find out ways to prevent it from happening again.
When do your emails get opened?
Gathering data about the hour when your newsletters are most frequently opened lets you pick the best sending time. When your emails reach clients at the most suitable times, such as during their coffee break, they are more likely to act on it.
This can be crucial when you collect work emails for your B2B sales. Even if most of your audience uses Gmail from Google Workspace, they won’t have the tabs associated with the regular version of Gmail. This means that they are notified about every single message, whether it’s a reply from their clients, a Slack message, or… your email. Identifying the right sending time can help you increase your conversion rate.
How did a particular message perform?
Email tracking gives you insights into your campaign performance. Basically, it allows you to gather data and compare various messages in terms of their effectiveness. Depending on what you want to know about your emails, you can use different email tracking tools.
If you include a pixel, you can learn more about which subject lines bring the most interest. By using different UTM tags, you can compare how different versions of your copy or CTA nudge readers into opening links. Finally, your SMTP server shows you an overview of how your messages are perceived.
By comparing one message to another, you can find elements that resonate with your audience and use this information to fine-tune your emails. You can also use this to test out various ideas. Email tracking systems help you spot what works for you.
What benefits does email tracking bring you?
With email tracking, you won’t only learn if your emails got delivered or not – there’s so much more to find out. Using an email tracking system also benefits other departments like sales, product, and customer service, since all of them work on understanding your target audience.
A unique source of insight
The data that email tracking brings might sound simple: you learn who opens your emails and clicks on the links they contain. But, together with other data sources, like your CRM, it can become a powerful addition to your toolbox.
Imagine a situation where you send an email as a part of your lead nurturing strategy. With an email tracking system, you’ll be notified about who opens the message and clicks on the links – and this information can land straight in your CRM with webhooks. Other tools can let you know what kind of content your lead has read. Combining these pieces of information together can tell you a lot about their needs and readiness to buy.
You can also look for patterns and segment your leads by the kinds of links they’re interested in. When you work on your selling strategy, pairing content together with tools like email tracking can work wonders.
A better understanding of your clients
Knowing how your target group interacts with your messages can tell you a lot about it. By trying and testing out different options, you’ll learn their preferences and interests. All of that helps you not only with your emails but also in other areas: from crafting your marketing strategy to improving your customer service.
If your audience reacts better to less formal language, you can tweak your overall communication strategy accordingly. You can also spot what topics are interesting and use this information to plan your content for blogs or social media.
Data to base your decisions on
Email tracking brings a lot of numbers to your team. With proper skills, you can change this raw data into meaningful information and use it to make smarter decisions.
For example, you can use such information to decide whether you should push to get more people subscribed to your newsletter or rather work on engaging your current audience. If your newsletter makes a decent contribution to your conversion rate, you can try to squeeze it even further.
How can you track your emails with Coresender?
Enabling email tracking with Coresender is reasonably simple. Here’s a brief set of instructions on how to set it up.
API
If you send emails with API, you need to set up two additional parameters:
The first parameter, “track_opens”, adds a tracking pixel to the HTML part of your message. The second parameter, “track_clicks”, replaces regular URLs with tracking links, but the recipient will still be directed to the original URL upon clicking.
For a more detailed reference, here’s the API documentation on sending emails.
SMTP
To enable email tracking in your SMTP, go to the Control panel and find Sending accounts. Choose the appropriate sending account you want to track, go to SMTP Server, scroll down to the Tracking section, and tick both options:
Viewing tracking data
When you have enabled data tracking, you can click on any email in the Activity section and view this timeline:
You can see here when your emails get opened and links clicked on – not only for the first time, but any time a client opens the message. You also see here details such as the device, operating system, and browser used to view your messages.
Recap
If you are considering email tracking tools and thinking about applying them to your business, the ideas start and end with improving your email strategies. That’s the most common approach, as you can learn which elements of your emails you should develop and which are good enough as they are.
However, there’s much more to be discovered in the numbers that an email tracking tool provides you with.
Email tracking is another source of information about your target group’s needs, preferences, and choices. Creating processes to merge this data with your other tools, like your CRM or Google Analytics, will give more depth to your customer intelligence.
And with Coresender, you can not only track your emails and obtain such data, but you can also work on improving your email efforts.
