Digital data plays a critical role in many businesses and companies today. Entrepreneurs, marketers, sales teams, and other specialists use it to make informed decisions that benefit their brands.
The same is true in the world of email marketing. Knowing whether your recipients could receive, open, and engage with your messages is essential because it helps you understand what’s going on. This is where open tracking comes in.
What Is Open Tracking?
Open tracking is a feature available in HTML emails that uses a 1-pixel image that allows marketers to acquire interaction data from their contacts. Each pixel has a unique code embedded to inform senders if an email was received and engaged with by a particular subscriber. The results are updated in real time, ensuring that you have the most recent metrics.
It’s important to keep in mind that this email tracking capability only works when using HTML in your messages. If you do, you can configure your email marketing platform to track emails that you send so it can monitor data such as the open rate and click rate from your contacts.
How Does Open Tracking Work?
As mentioned above, open tracking uses a specific tracking ability that lets senders know when their contacts have opened their emails, clicked on their links, engaged with their content, and more. A discreet image pixel is placed within each message to gather specific information on the date and time an email was accessed.
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For marketing, email tracking this way is seen as extremely useful. This is primarily because it lets senders know if their contacts open their messages and interact with them.
In email tracking software, the details that can be acquired consist of the contact’s device, browser, and IP address. It also records the time and date of when they opened a certain email.
What Are the Benefits of Open Tracking?
Seeing that open tracking can be quite useful, what are the benefits marketers can obtain with such a feature?
Here are the main reasons why this type of email tracking is advantageous in email campaigns:
Ensures Email Relevancy
Email tracking comes with the necessary data you need for your email campaigns. When you know how your readers engage with your messages, you can change and adapt your email marketing strategy to make it more effective and efficient.
For example, open tracking informs you how many of your subscribers regularly open your messages. You can then take advantage of this information by sending follow-up emails to these specific users to increase the probability of converting.
Lets You Avoid Being Marked As Spam
One of the most important benefits of open tracking is that you’ll know which recipients aren’t interacting with your messages and clicking your links. When you can identify such contacts, you can remove them from your list and prioritize those who are more responsive.
Knowing that you can get marked as spam if you continue to send to inactive subscribers, being able to pinpoint such contacts can help prevent that from happening.
Helps Refine Your Mailing List
Since you will know which of your contacts aren’t actively interacting with your messages, you can refine your email list by segmenting or deleting these subscribers.
Keeping your list hygiene in good shape is ideal if you want to effectively send emails to a relevant audience.
Why Marketers Need Email Tracking
The ability to monitor the various metrics of your email marketing campaigns is a crucial ability that lets you determine how successful your efforts have been thus far. Knowing what you’re doing right and wrong is important if you want to succeed here.
Email tracking lets you see why a specific email campaign is doing well or not. This allows you to make changes in how you approach your subscribers and design your emails.
The ability to email track lets you identify various email marketing metrics. Although there are many, the 3 most essential factors to a great email marketing campaign are:
- Deliverability rate: Your email deliverability rate is one of the most critical email tracking metrics you need to consider as an email marketer. This is because it determines whether your messages are landing in their designated inboxes or are being redirected to the spam and junk folders.
- Click-through rate: This email tracking metric monitors the number of link clicks your email content has received over the total amount of emails that you sent. Clicks are necessary for email marketing if you want to convince subscribers to continue in their buying journey. One of the best ways you can increase the click-through rate is to make the messaging more targeted and relevant to your readers.
- Open rate: The open rate of your email marketing campaign is the number of opens your messages have received over the total emails you sent out. Your subject lines play a direct impact on your open rate since these are the first things your contacts read upon receiving your emails.
How to Set Up Open Tracking in Your Email Campaign
The process of setting up this feature in an email campaign is straightforward. Here are the steps you should take to leverage this ability:
Step #1: Establish Guidelines on Email Tracking
Although email tracking and open tracking are both methods that can be used to enhance customer experiences, there are also ways it can be abused especially by malicious individuals. That’s why it’s important to use the two techniques responsibly.
You should establish guidelines on how you and your team should use email tracking on your contacts. Once your colleagues have been notified of certain metrics, they should then follow the proper protocol of reaching out to your recipients.
Defining how your team should take advantage of email tracking tools is also a great idea. This can be included in the privacy policy of your company and should be part of the onboarding of new members.
All of these things should be set up even before you begin using tracking capabilities in your emails. Doing so not only ensures an excellent customer experience but also helps avoid you avoid being penalized by anti-spam organizations and inbox providers.
Step #2: Install the Appropriate Email Tracking System
There are many email tracking systems available today and one of the best can be found from MailMonitor. Our email marketing platform lets you leverage tools that will provide insights into how your campaign is doing so far.
You can receive notifications whenever users have interacted with your messages, allowing you to change your marketing tactics as you see fit.
Step #3: Create Your Email With Tracking Capability
Setting up the email tracking and open tracking of your messages is just the first part. You also have to craft and ensure that your content is valuable to your target audience.
Failing to make your emails worthwhile to your readers can cause many of them to stop engaging, unsubscribe, and worse, even mark you off as spam. You want subscribers to be constantly on the lookout for your next email, and a great way of doing this is to provide value in your content.
Step #4: Activate Email Tracking and Send Away
This is where every email marketing tool will have a different approach to turning on its email tracking capabilities. However, the concept remains the same: activate the feature to start tracking email deliverability metrics as soon as they come in.
Many of these tools will have a drop-down menu, indicator, or checkbox that you can click on to ensure that tracking is active. You want to make sure that you’ve informed your recipients about your brand using such tracking capability before you press send.
If you already have their permission beforehand, then you can go ahead and disperse your messages.
How to Use Email Tracking Effectively
At this point, you should have a good indication of the right time to schedule and send your email marketing campaign. Once you do, go ahead and begin distributing your emails while keeping track of the results.
An ideal way of measuring click-through rate performance is by identifying how many of your recipients have clicked on your emails at least once. You should then divide that by the total emails you’ve sent and multiply that by 100. This should provide you with the click-through percentage of your campaign.
To know what your open rates are, just divide the total emails that your contacts have opened by the number that you delivered. Try not to include those bounced messages, as these shouldn’t be part of the calculation.
Instead, you should calculate the bounce rate and other important KPIs separately to effectively determine your campaign’s performance.
Conclusion
Open tracking is one of the key features available in email tracking. It allows senders to receive information about specific aspects of their email marketing campaigns, such as open and click-through rates.
Using such tracking capability is important for every marketer as it allows them to change the way they approach their campaigns depending on what they learn concerning their metrics.
