Everything You Need to Know About Email Tracking

Email marketing has long been established as a cost-effective and non-intrusive mode of communication for brands and businesses to hit targets. What makes email marketing a successful tool to achieve business goals is how well you have utilized email tracking to understand the scope of this marketing channel. By deploying email tracking, you get to observe various parameters like click-through rates, open rates, and other actionable information, ultimately getting to grow your business and achieve your targets.

Let’s take a closer look at email tracking and how to leverage it to your advantage.

Table of contents

• What is email tracking?
• How are emails tracked?
• Why should you track emails?
• How can email tracking help businesses score growth goals?
• What are the ways to track emails?
• What are some of the most common email tracking software?
• How to use email tracking effectively?
• Use Email Tracking to Your Advantage with Mailmodo

What is email tracking?

Email tracking is location, frequency, and time-based analysis for a detailed reporting of how often, for how long, and what actions are taken on an email sent out by your brand. You can precisely find out open rate, time stamp, and click-through rates on the links and attachments with email tracking. It provides you a clear picture of the subscriber’s response to your email communication and completely takes out the guesswork for planning and optimizing your email marketing strategy.

Let’s say you are planning to test a set of discount codes for your eCommerce business. With in-built email tracking, you can pinpoint your audience’s response to your communication. You can easily find out whether your customer base is more inclined to upselling offers or discount-driven offers. Along with a host of other features, you can leverage email tracking to enhance your business goals with confidence.

How are emails tracked?

Emails are tracked by integrating a pixel in the email. This pixel is coded in the email and captures all the crucial data like opening the email, clicks, and duration a user spends on consuming your email communication.

Innovative email service providers, like Mailmodo, have the email tracking software built into the platform and can get granular analysis at a single click.

This means when you choose an ESP with email tracking, without having to make backlinks and integrate those with your email settings additionally, you can effortlessly be in more control of your email marketing plans. Email tracking is done by:

Adding a pixel code to email

The base process of email tracking is done by adding unique links to your email communication. These embedded links provide exact details of the audience's response to crucial parameters such as clicks on any button such as a “Buy Now” opening the highlighted webpages and their organic interaction.

Tracking the response of the users

Once a user has received the mail, with tracking, you can know the email delivery rate. After successful delivery, you can see how many people have opened the mail or clicked on offer pages and completed the transaction, such as either buying a product or subscribing to a newsletter.

Why should you track emails?

Email marketing without any insights on the previous batch of communications is like taking a shot in the dark. Without email tracking, you will always be clueless on how to improve the performance of your email marketing plans. The immense benefits of learning how to do email tracking are:

1. Save time and efforts

With a clear picture of the user’s response, you can devise email campaigns based on past results. This means you can steer clear of countless rounds of follow-up communication and close the leads in less time.

Suppose you are planning to test out an offer in the B2C space or pitching potential B2B clients. You can smartly tweak your offering based on the initial response and save time instead of blindly going about the next round of follow-ups.

Related guides:

A Comprehensive Guide To B2C Email Marketing

Your One-Stop Guide For B2B Email Marketing to Drive Sales

2. Build prospects with the right perspective

With detailed reports by email tracking, you can pinpoint the effective areas of your email marketing plan. For example, when you pitch to a prospective client, you can see their response to prior communication and plan further. This gives you the control to make informed business decisions.

3. Send more impactful follow-ups

Once email tracking is enabled in your campaigns, you can plan the follow-ups in a way that gets you higher conversions and transactions. Since you can see the audience’s response in a granular manner, you can smartly communicate with them in the future to cater to their needs and convert the leads by looking at the smallest of actions taken.

4. Schedule emails as per the preferred time of your audience

As is the case with most things, timing is of huge importance in email marketing. Just by simply noticing when users are opening your email, you can schedule the next lot of emails at a time most convenient to your users.

How can email tracking help businesses score growth goals?

Consider a scenario where you are trying to land a new client, and after initial interest from their side, the conversation has come to a halt. But when you have the email tracking embedded in your communication, you can instantly find out of any latest action taken by them on your communication.

Say, after multiple follow-ups, you get no response but suddenly see some activity by them on your email links or blogs. In this instance, you can instantly contextualize the next round of conversation based on the response and convert the lead.

For example, in the case of “Ambition,” a software product built to improve employee’s efficiency, the brand increased their leads from a mere 6 to an astounding 73 leads over few weeks. When their cold emails targeted about 291 senior executives of prospective leads, they got a response only from 6 users. But after deploying email tracking and studying the detailed response of all users, they did follow-up rounds of email campaigns and ultimately increased the number of high ticket B2B leads to 73.

What are the ways to track emails?

One can get email tracking done by either integrating a pixel in the email or simply choose an email service provider like Mailmodo who offers inbuilt tracking services. Choosing the latter option has multiple benefits because you can gather much more than open rates and click-through rates with a dedicated email service provider.

With the user’s permission, you can assess their complete profile from multiple information points like social media, purchase history, persona type, and interest levels by tracking email usage.

What are some of the most common email tracking software?

Out of many options available, a few names stand out in the field of email tracking services. Four such top email tracking software is:

1. Mailmodo

Perhaps the only email tracking service provider with AMP emails, Mailmodo offers a host of features unmatched by other email service providers. Mailmodo is designed to help you leverage the power of AMP Emails for creating a better user experience and simplifying email marketing setup.

Key Features:

• Automate drip sequences based on user behavior & market data to send emails.

• Option to integrate with AWS SES, Sendgrid & Pepipost.

• Segments users based on past campaign metrics like open, click & submissions.

• Visualises all your data - opens, clicks, unsubscribes & submissions.

Pricing:

Free Trial - 200 emails per day along with paid plans ranging from $49-499/month

2. Hubspot

Among the best email tracking software is Hubspot sales and marketing software. These smart software automate the audience information collection, adding value to in-built A/B testing available in the Hubspot suite.

Key Features:

• Tailored to the needs of marketers and salespeople

• Full-funnel tracking helps visualize the big picture of the role email plays.

• Tracks email opens and engagement, and it automatically loads that information into each prospect’s CRM data.

Pricing:

HubSpot offers free plans for all of its software. Paid plans start at $50 per month for both the Marketing and Sales Hubs.

3. Salesforce Pardot

Salesforce’s email tracking suite offers an extensive range of insights that help you to optimize sales and branding campaigns. It also offers smart features like spam filter check-ups to ensure maximum delivery and detail gathering.

Key Features:

• B2B marketing automation software focuses on the marketing side of email tracking.

• Offers support for email A/B testing, plus rendering and spam filter check-ups.

Pricing:

Starts at $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts

4. Zoho Campaigns

Zoho provides a host of email tracking services along with SalesIQ and CRM features. With Zoho email tracking services, you can drill down the user’s response to every tiny detail to ultimately help in planning and optimization.

Key Features:

• Offers several solutions, including SalesIQ, CRM, and Campaigns.

• Supports A/B testing so that you can find the most effective subject line, CTAs, and more.

Pricing:

Zoho Campaigns offers a limited Free plan. Paid plans start at $3 per month or $6 per email.

How to use email tracking effectively?

By choosing either an email tracking software or an email service provider like Mailmodo, you can be assured of getting the best of your email marketing program. With these tracking services, you can do extensive testing to figure out your audience’s buying behavior parameters.

For example, by testing small details like using emoticons in the subject line during certain occasions or experimenting with call-to-action designs, you can find the kind of content your audience likes to consume. In other words, with email tracking, you can test extensively to achieve business goals within time.

A millennial app like Tinder is all about staying in sync with the target audience's ways of talking. For users who have either uninstalled the app or are not renewing the paid plans, the brand employs well-timed emails with lucrative offers and value-added features that a person looks forward to. By taking into account all the actions taken by users on these initial emails gathered through email marketing, Tinder plans the next set of emails. With these rounds of drip email campaigns that cater to the needs of the audience, Tinder ultimately manages to get the users back on the app and increase the transactions of paying users.

Use Email Tracking to Your Advantage with Mailmodo

Mailmodo provides email tracking free of cost and empowers you to get the maximum out of the email marketing plans with unique insights. With intelligent insights gathered through Mailmodo email tracking, you can plan better and achieve the business goals faster.

These insights will empower you to test out your communication on multiple factors, which means you can be sure of creating a winning email strategy. Email tracking also provides you details on who is consuming your communication and who’s not. Accordingly, you can edit and segregate your subscriber list of active and inactive users.

In other words, you get complete control of your email marketing plans with Mailmodo’s in-built tracking. With exhaustive testing, you can gather clinically precise information for continuous optimization of email marketing strategy.

Come, enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing plans with smart tracking by Mailmodo.