Tracking Your Email Marketing Campaigns

One of the primary benefits of email marketing (and Internet marketing for that matter) is the ability to track real results. Without proper email marketing tracking, it becomes impossible to optimize your campaigns and lists over time.

Why Tracking Your Emails Is Important

• Save – without having the opportunity to see which subscribers do not even look at their emails, you will not be able to delete those subscribers and will thus be wasting your money on them.

• Optimize – equally important is the ability to see which email combinations result in conversions. Over time, you should be recording which subject lines, template formats and calls to action perform best, and then use these to increase results.

Email Marketing Tracking Strategies

Although there is no perfect way to track everything your customer does with an email, there are simple email marketing tracking best practices which can help get you the information you need. The most important thing you need to do in order to track emails is to make use of HTML emails, not text emails. Because there is no way to track subscriber interaction with text emails, it is important that you find the best email marketing software to help you do this successfully (see our best email marketing software to see software that can do this).

The way HTML emails track user interactions is through an image load and a URL. When a user opens their email, the first thing to be loaded is a 1 x 1 transparent image from an external server. Whenever the image is requested from the server, a successful email hit is recorded.  This is by far the most common form of tracking simply because it works so well. However, be warned that many email programs, such as Gmail, block images from loading by default, so no matter what you do, you will never have 100% accurate number for your email marketing tracking.

The other way emails are commonly tracked is by including a hyperlink within the email which, once a user clicks on it, records a successful interaction. Note that this method of tracking can be utilized in addition to an HTML email message.

All of this can be successfully integrated into your website analytics, which will allow you to not only track the success of your emails, but also track the conversations they result in. As mentioned earlier, tracking your campaign results is incredibly important to the success of your email marketing campaigns and your business. As long as you use the above tips for email marketing tracking, you will be on your way to setting up your email list and will be able to optimize your results over time.

See our best email marketing software to get software that can help you track your email marketing campaigns.