Although you may hear that your email is outdated and that your target audience is marked as spam by default, email tracking is a common tactic for effective email marketing.
Email is still one of the most important marketing tools for businesses. If companies do not use a visitor tracking tool or a channel to communicate with customers, they will lose many potential customers.
There are even projects that have survived only because of email.
What is email tracking?
Email tracking is an effective tool that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of emails. This allows professionals to measure the reaction of subscribers to specific messages and the communication channel as a whole.
Imagine that you have been invited to give a lecture at a professional conference. But the audience was behind the curtain. In such a situation, it is impossible to assess the audience’s reaction.
The situation is similar with email. If you keep sending out emails and not seeing a response from your subscribers, you’re not going to get anywhere.
Conversions may still happen, but using email tracking tools can be a much more effective marketing process. You can see how customers respond to your emails using the tools and services of your email service provider.
This will allow you to adjust your marketing strategy, increase the number of potential customers, and create a stable and growing trend of exchanging orders through this channel.
It’s important to understand that your email list is more than just a string of letters and numbers. Some potential customers can make money for your business.
If they care about your product or service, you just have to inspire them more. If you open the email tracking feature in your email, you can see what percentage of your email subscribers are responding positively to your content.
For example, if only 5% of people open your email, you need to change your email marketing strategy and maybe the content you put in your messages (the content should be authentic and engaging).
It is important to pay attention to the key useful tools that can improve your email and the speed of mail delivery.
Important benefits of the email tracking process
The biggest advantage of tracking is that it provides a complete picture of subscriber behavior.
You can see how many users opened an email, when exactly they opened it, and how their interaction changes with subsequent emails they receive from you.
The email tracking process allows you to create effective marketing templates that can be used consistently to achieve specific business goals.
Marketers and entrepreneurs can send 3-5 welcome emails to new subscribers and see which emails they respond to and which emails are opened the most.
This information can be used to improve your marketing strategy. Key benefits of email tracking include:
- Track key metrics. This will allow you to see how loyal your emails are to your subscribers. If you use this information correctly, you will be able to work with your marketing channel much more effectively;
- A complete history of customer relations. For certain emails, you can monitor changes in user behavior in relation to the marketing technique employed.
- Modern email tracking software saves time. Thanks to observation, you can determine the best marketing business model and use it constantly to improve the results of business activity;
- Space for experiments. You can try different ways to spread the word about promotions, new product offers, or price reductions;
- Business growth indicators Improving the effectiveness of your marketing strategy leads to increased conversions, more orders received from customers, and other important marketing indicators.
It is no exaggeration to say that without email tracking, certain marketing activities will not be effective. Therefore, before starting active work, it is necessary to pay attention to various important technical details.
How does the email tracking process work?
Not all marketers and managers take the time to understand exactly how the email tracking process works. It is justified when there is no time and everything is fine, but knowledge is needed for general development.
The essence of the email tracking process is to use visitor identification tool. They are integrated into the text of the letter and help to record important information.
Most popular messaging platforms use this method. You can enable the tracking of open letters in the settings of Gmail and Outlook mail services.
In addition to regular e-mails, analysis of mail services, and tracking tools, there is the possibility of using Google Analytics and similar solutions.
This allows you to track clicks on links that are present in e-mails, in the text of the e-mail.
All modern tracking technologies have their own complex advantages and disadvantages, so you need to choose the right solution for you.
You don’t need to contact the analytics service to check whether the recipient opened the email or not. For almost any email, the basics are enough to give you email tracking options.
If marketers and business owners don’t know what percentage of their subscribers are using email, time is wasted. It should be noted that reading the email is important given the current level of spam and other marketing emails.
Open tracking can be done via email, but it’s not an ideal solution for mass email marketing. Professional email open-tracking software is recommended for such tasks.
There are other metrics to track. Focusing on just one metric doesn’t give you the full picture of how effective your marketing channel is. Clicks are tracked with a special tag attached to the URL.
If you have 5–10 links in your email, you can see which links your customers click on the most and adjust your email accordingly to make your marketing strategy work effectively.
Even if the email contains no products or offers, it still contains more than one URL. It can be a review of transactions, an unsubscribe from a newsletter, or something else.
Activity monitoring
Activity tracking refers to additional activities that allow you to receive additional signals about the behavior of potential customers. This information can help you improve your email marketing strategy.
For example, analytics systems can determine which devices are most often used to send emails to customers. Since 95% of people use smartphones, it makes sense to focus on mobile devices.
Today’s email-tracking services are constantly improving their key technical capabilities and providing users with more email-tracking tools. Your mail delivery will be more efficient.
Some trackers can monitor downloads and send notifications when subscribers perform certain actions.
Most analytical services perform their work 100%, but it should be taken into account that the reports may contain errors. The size of the possible error depends on how correctly the tracking technology is implemented.
The bug also affects the percentage of users who have third-party tracking blocked. Tracking clicks is real, but other metrics get tricky.