In this article we go over a common question about email campaigns: email tracking and their open rate.
Without a doubt, having this information is one of the advantages of using an email tool instead of sending from any email client, such as Gmail, Outlook, etc.
Thanks to it, we can learn about various aspects of our email marketing, how it is evolving, whether we have specific problems, etc. What is the point of sending emails if we can’t track them?
In this article we are going to explain clearly how tracking works, how opens are measured and clear up some common questions.
This way you will be better able to weigh and interpret the statistics you get from your email campaigns.
Let’s get started!
· How do you create an email account?
Before getting into email tracking in an email marketing campaign, it is essential to have an email account or mailbox.
If you don’t have one yet, creating one is a quick and easy process.
Below is a short guide on how to set up your own email account.
- Choose an email provider: There are several popular and reliable email providers, such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. Each one offers different features and functions, so choose the one that best suits your personal or business needs.
- Sign up for an account: Once you have chosen an email provider, visit its website and follow the sign-up process. This process usually involves providing basic information, such as your name, date of birth and phone number, as well as choosing a unique username and password.
- Set up the account: After creating your account, you can customize the settings to your preferences. This includes adding a personalized signature, selecting a profile picture and adjusting notifications. You will also be able to organize your emails into folders and labels to keep your inbox tidy.
· What is email tracking?
Email tracking is a technique that allows email senders to track recipients’ behavior, such as open rate, clicks on links, downloads of attachments, among others.
This information is valuable for evaluating the effectiveness of an email campaign and for making informed decisions in future communications with recipients.
· How do email tools track emails and opens?
Once the email has been sent and delivered to the destination server, if the server has accepted it, how can we know that an email has been opened?
The system most email tools use is to insert a small transparent image in the footer of the email, at the very end.
It is a very small image, just 1 pixel (the name probably sounds familiar) in size.
Since it is transparent, small and placed at the very end, it doesn’t affect how the email looks in any way.
If you have run other online marketing campaigns, or you are familiar with conversion tracking, the concept of a conversion pixel is probably not new to you.
This image works in a very similar way.
When the subscriber receives the email, the moment they open it a request is made to the server hosting the image, in order to download it.
Since the image is hosted on the servers of the email marketing tool, the request is recorded and we know that there has been an open.
► Every image is unique
The image included in each email is unique, and therefore the open can be reliably associated with the subscriber.
Now that it is clear how mailing open detection works, let’s go over some of the questions that may come up.
· Common questions about open tracking in mailings
A very common question is about the accuracy of open measurement.
The answer is that the opens measured will be correct, all of them, since they have been measured reliably.
However, there is something more: there will be more opens than the ones shown.
Why does this happen?
Because if the recipient doesn’t have the option to display images enabled in their email client, it won’t be possible to count the open.
So there is always a chance that there are more opens than the ones reported in the email marketing tool.
► Incorrect locations
This is another frequent question about email tracking.
Tools like Mailrelay provide information about the geographic location of subscribers. This is information that can be very useful to us, but sometimes it can be wrong, and opens may appear in geographic locations that don’t match.
Why does this happen?
The reality is that most of the time this happens when we send emails to email clients such as Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo!
When we send mailings to these email clients, it is usual for them to cache the images on their servers, so that they load faster on the user’s device and to check whether they contain viruses.
This means that we will be seeing location information for the servers that cached the images.
Unfortunately, this behavior can’t be avoided.
· Email tracking: opens and unique opens
This is another aspect we need to consider in relation to the tracking of the emails we send, and the open rate.
Email marketing tools like Mailrelay provide information on both:
- Total opens
- And unique opens
In total opens we will find information about all the opens our email campaign has had, including subscribers who have opened the email more than once; improve your open rate by using symbols in the subject line.
Unique opens, on the other hand, only add one open per subscriber; repeated opens by the same subscriber won’t add new opens.
Although not all email marketing tools separate this data, at Mailrelay we believe it is important to break it down, so you will find it separated in the advanced statistics.
· Don’t confuse open tracking with click tracking
Email tracking works differently for opens than for clicks.
For opens we have seen that an image is used, and that it therefore depends on the recipient’s email client.
However, links don’t work like that.
Every link in the newsletter is replaced by a tracking link.
When clicked, this tracking link does two things:
- First, it counts the click to update the statistics
- And then it redirects to the original link
This way, link tracking is, in a way, more reliable than open tracking.
· In summary
In this article we have seen how the email tracking done by email marketing tools works, and also what limitations it has. As an extra tip, remember that there are words you shouldn’t use in your email campaigns. If you want to know more, here is a post where you can find out which 25 words could negatively affect the open rate of your emails.
This will help us better understand how the statistics of our email campaigns are generated.
We hope this short article has been useful to you.
This data is part of the most important email marketing metrics, and understanding your open rate well will help you interpret them better.
Jose Argudo
CMO of Mailrelay. Writes about email marketing, copywriting and conversion for small businesses and entrepreneurs.