Tracking email engagement is an important tactic for getting to know your target audience’s interests and preferences. This generates valuable insights for email marketing actions.

In this way, it is possible to develop knowledge and improve communication strategies, creating increasingly targeted and interesting messages.

Identifying the behavior of recipients allows you to know how many and which contacts are relevant to your product/service. That’s why interpreting email marketing data is fundamental to the success of a campaign.

Next, we’ll look at various ways of tracking email and how this practice can contribute to your customers’ loyalty journey.

Tracking email to interpret data

To track email, you need a good email marketing platform. The automation services offered by your chosen tool will generate campaign performance diagnostics.

These diagnostics are the performance reports. It is from these that the professional interprets the data and makes decisions relating to prospect and lead nurturing, bottom of funnel actions, post-sales, among others.

The most effective way of tracking email is through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). See which are the most commonly used to analyze campaign performance.

First analyses

• Delivery and deliverability: although they have similar names, these two interpretations of performance show different results. The delivery rate only indicates that the emails were delivered. In other words, the messages arrived but may have gone to the spam folder. In short, the delivery rate doesn’t tell you which folder the message was delivered to. It’s the deliverability rate that tells you whether the emails were actually delivered to the inbox. Is the difference between the two metrics clear?
• Open rate: what makes a person open an email? The subject line and the preheader (the phrase that appears right after the subject line) are the “baits” that lead the reader into the email. The open rate will tell you whether the copywriting is doing its job of attracting the user’s attention. A low open rate suggests the need to reformulate the copywriting or even review the day and time of sending, which are related to the topic we’ll look at next.
• Open rate and responsiveness: emails with responsive layouts offer visual adaptability to the screens of different devices, such as desktops (as we saw earlier); smartphones, tablets and even some smart TVs. And viewing the metrics on the different devices provides professionals with details that directly affect marketing and layout decisions.
• Date and time the email was opened: this isn’t exactly a performance indicator, but it is very relevant information. Knowing the day and time the email was opened reveals the recipient’s habits, and this serves to adjust the open rate. Another feature of this information is the possibility of getting to know your target audience better. In this way, you can not only improve your communication with them, but also create a closer relationship.

Content analysis

• Click Through Rate (CTR): reveals how many people clicked on the clickable elements of the email content, which can be links, CTA buttons or access to videos, for example. This metric works with quantities and serves to analyze the level of user engagement. In other words, a high click-through rate means that the content of the email is having the expected effect, both in terms of copywriting and layout.
• Click to Open Rate (CTOR): this is the ratio between clicks and the total number of emails opened, to show which clickable elements have had the most access. Analyzing this performance is valuable for e-commerce, since your emails contain several products with links to checkout pages.
• Conversion rate: indicates how many people actually clicked on a CTA and carried out the expected action (a purchase or a subscription, for example). This metric helps assess the overall effectiveness of the campaign.
• Heat map: this tool uses a color scale to measure data. Through this method, it is possible to track which places in the email are attracting the most attention from users, as well as visualizing the most clicked elements. In other words, the heat map can do all the measurements mentioned above, as well as providing more complex data, depending on what has been planned in the marketing objectives. All of this culminates in optimizing the user experience and also in repositioning elements or offers in the email, prioritizing the most important ones in the areas that have the largest audience.

General analysis

• Unsubscribe rate: a high unsubscribe rate may indicate that the content of the email is not meeting the expectations of the recipients. You need to review the campaign to find out where the error lies: the frequency of the emails may be too high; the content is not making sense with the recipient’s expectations; the promise of the subject line is at odds with the content; among many other reasons that can lead to unsubscribes.
• Bounce rate: these are emails with delivery failures, i.e. how many emails were rejected by the provider and didn’t reach the user’s inbox. This directly affects the deliverability rate.

There are two types of rejection: soft bounces (temporary problems) and hard bounces (permanent problems). Mailing lists containing 3% bounces are blocked by ISPs. SafetyMails is a verification service that removes bounces and invalid emails from lists. Keep your lists clean and achieve high deliverability rates!

• Spam complaints: high spam complaint rates show that recipients are very dissatisfied. But are you sending the emails with their authorization? Or have you gone back to sending emails to users who have unsubscribed? These two questions lead to the conclusion that mailing lists should never be bought or exchanged. And also that user decisions (such as unsubscribing) must be respected. Otherwise, you run the risk of being classified as a spammer by the providers. And this is very damaging to a sender’s reputation. Watch out!

Specialized tracking email tools

It’s important to note that tracking options can vary according to the tool you choose. In other words, the performance indicators may not be the same on all platforms.

That said, we suggest some professional tools available on the market:

• Mailchimp: tracking email with this platform allows access to the performance indicators most commonly used to measure campaign performance: open rates, clicks, among other metrics.
• Sendinblue: like Mailchimp, it offers email marketing automation, allowing you to track email and analyze campaign performance through performance reports.
• Mailbiz: more geared towards e-commerce, this tool offers integration with other tools besides email with a focus on optimizing online sales.
• HubSpot Sales: offers CRM integration, providing email tracking and insights into how leads interact with your messages, facilitating relationship management.
• Mailtrack: a free extension for Gmail that allows you to track email and view open rates. It’s important to note that Mailtrack only has this indicator. It is not possible to view other metrics apart from the open rate.

Important

The suggestions we’ve given refer to some of the best-known tools used by email marketers.

However, there is a wide range of platforms specializing in tracking email and offering specific solutions. Therefore, when choosing the tool to work with your email marketing, take your company’s needs into consideration.

Conclusion

Tracking email is an essential practice for any marketer looking to optimize their strategies and get better results. By understanding how recipients interact with your messages, you can adjust campaigns, segment your audience more precisely and improve engagement. All this reflects positively on the ROI of your campaigns.

Just to remind you, the highest ROI in digital marketing belongs to email marketing. By applying email tracking strategies and interpreting the data generated by performance reports, you increase your chances of success.

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