The Complete Guide to Email Tracking
Has it ever happened that you’ve sent an email and wondered what has happened with it? Have you ever written multiple follow-ups and received no answer? Have you ever spoiled numerous marketing efforts when your newsletter went to spam, and you haven’t known about that? These are the typical problems marketers meet when they don’t use email tracking.
In this guide, we’ll explain the benefits of email tracking for businesses, show how to track an email and which email tracking software to choose. You’ll understand how your marketing efforts can reach a new level with email tracking. Let’s start our magical journey!
What Is Email Tracking?
Email tracking is the process of monitoring the clicks and opens of your emails. It works immediately when the recipient opens your email, and he does not even know that you’ve tracked the delivery.
The technology is similar to the one used in the email marketing applications. It just adds the web beacon to the email you send, and each moment the recipient opens an email, you receive a specific notification. In most cases, it is just a small image pixel not seen in the eyes.
Why Do You Need to Track Emails?
The tracking email opens a crucial analytical tool in your marketing campaign. It’s essential to understand the open email rates, which emails are more readable than the others.
“Such analytics can guide your email marketing process and raise the effectiveness of your newsletters and marketing campaigns. Using the right email tracking software can gather important data about your clients, such as demographics, customer preferences, etc.”, says Steve Brady from Allen Law Firm, P.A.
If you integrate these results with your CRM, you receive potent statistics that will help you measure progress and boost your sales efforts.
5 Benefits of Email Tracking for Businesses
There are multiple benefits to tracking emails. At the top is its ability to make your workflow more efficient. Consequently, your sales increase and productivity raises. Let’s explore what email tracking can do for your business:
- Save time
It frequently happens that people do not open emails, and you have to know about that. If a person has not opened your first email, it’s quite likely that he’d never open the follow-ups. On the other side, if you know the recipients who opened your emails, you can make your follow-up more relevant and, in the future, build effective long-term relationships. It is essential in leads qualification when you’re sending thousands of cold emails.
2. Improve management
When you’re a manager, you communicate with many employees through emails. In your case, email tracking is the perfect opportunity to understand their engagement. You realize who opens emails and who ignores them.
3. Identify prospective leads
When you’re a sales representative who sends multiple emails to prospects, you do not know whether they are interested in your offer or not. Email tracking can help you to identify potential leads and develop a well-targeted future strategy to win them.
4. Optimize your emails
Sometimes you’re sure that the messages you send to clients are perfect, but there is certainly room for improvement, and email tracking is the right tool for optimization. You can get all the required information on the audience engagement and make corrections to the emails, which are not sufficient.
5. Meet deadlines and keep documentation in order
You’re sending much necessary documentation through emails: contracts, invoices, business proposals, etc. Sometimes you have to understand whether the document has arrived in time, and here the email tracking software comes into play. You can be sure that all deadlines are met, and recipients get the required information in time.
Email Tracking Process: How to Track an Email?
All these matters are viable, including countless extraordinary strategies then equipment using them. Let’s analyze how email tracking works in modern times.
- Read receipts
Read receipts have been pretty an issue considering the prompt days on email. For a notification to be obtained, the mail recipient must enable read receipts in their settings or permit to send a receipt.
This is a very pushy notification system and can work if mailed from and to the same email client. If you want to use a Gmail address, it will pass over this request. Not knowing what email program the recipient is using, the notification would fall into a black hole.
As you can see, this way of email tracking is uncommon and not very reliable to use. But, on the plus side, if you get an email receipt notification, the recipient expressly authorized it.
- Tracking Pixels
Tracking Pixels are one of the most common ways to check out email opens. These are 1 pixel by one small pixel pictures integrated into emails. They’re perdu by recipients and don’t affect the access an email looks at, but furnish quite perfect results. When the email is opened, the image is loaded from the server and considered an “open.” This is how email open rates are calculated in many email tracking tools.
This way of tracking is reliable but not 100% accurate. Because many email programs don’t always load images when opening emails. In most cases, images are not automatically downloaded, and the recipient must give the authority to download images on the email open. Mail recipients can still look at the content of the email without notifying it as open.
Anyway, tracking pixels help you get some information about users, their location, and the type of device they are using. You can find out whether they come from a paid search, Twitter, or Facebook and increase your email marketing ROI.
- Trackable Links
Using trackable links in an email is considered an excellent way to reliably track email click rates, traffic, and other metrics connected with email tracking. Once you decide to use email tracking software that creates email link codes, you could check out when and what users clicked on.
Make sure that all trackable links can be created differently. The email tracking tool can offer various data methods, from counting the number of clicks to any possible engagement involved with the links.
Email Tracking Metrics
The critical thing leading to email tracking success is the proper choice of the metrics determining its efficiency. The best thing is to focus on the metrics being relevant to your strategic goals.
For example, if your goal is to grow qualified leads, you need to measure pipeline contribution or the impact of email tracking on the different stages of the sales cycle. But if you’re interested in the effect on marketing performance, track ROI.
Don’t stick to only one metric — the open-rate. You have to analyze many indicators like response rate, delivery rate, forward rare, abuse rate, etc., to understand receipts’ engagement at various communication stages. Remember that email tracking’s real effectiveness comes from your ability to measure required indicators, analyze metrics, and implement strategic changes based on such analysis.
Why Do You Need an Email Tracking Software?
If you’re a business owner, the growth of your customer base should be an important priority. Hence, you require to track your emails and use specific email tracking software to control the sales pipeline and have access to various data.
The right email tracking tools provide a lot of benefits that you could get:
- Connect with the right prospects at the right time
- Respond to customers according to their needs
- Use the proper context in your communication with leads.
- Personalize your emails
- Raise the productivity of your sales team
- Gain meaningful contacts
In this case, SendX enables you to not only receive real-time email alerts and insightful email metrics but get clear visibility into your reps’ email activities. The tool includes detailed information about slide-by-slide viewing time, location, forwards, and viewer alerts. You will know when and what your customers are paying attention to.
Define Your Objectives in Email Tracking
How you use email tracking significantly depends on your objectives. Think about your strategy before starting email tracking. That will make your business processes more efficient, and you’ll develop the right strategy.
In case you need to know whether your recipient has received your email, you might not need the specific email tracking software. But when you are a sales rep or a marketer, using email tracking software provides you with multiple insights. With that, you can improve your sales results, raise the customers’ engagement, and outperform the competitors.
