
Mailchimp
Email tracking software serves two related key functions for your email marketing campaigns: It provides you with valuable analytics and helps you to more precisely nurture leads. It does both of these things by tracking email open rates, click-through rates, download rates and conversions, creating a data set that allows you to closely monitor your campaigns and understand which emails are getting the best response from which potential customers.
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Email marketing may not be the hottest trend in marketing these days—other forms of outreach such as content marketing and social media marketing are certainly much more discussed on marketing websites and blogs—but it's still the essential backbone of contemporary business marketing, and possibly the most popular form of marketing today.
As we define it in our email marketing Buyer's Guide, "email marketing software is used to create, launch and track email campaigns to promote a company's marketing message. It uses email as the primary vehicle for 'keeping in touch' with leads. Its goal is to nurture the leads and keep the brand's solution top-of-mind, until the leads are ready to convert into paying customers."
Email tracking software is an important supplement to email marketing software. It provides an additional set of tools allowing you to track the emails you send out and collect analytical information about them, including email open rates, the number of clicks on links and the number of downloads of attachments.
This Buyer's Guide will explain what email tracking software is, explore its key features and help you consider some key questions you should ask yourself—and software vendors you're considering—as you choose the right software for your business.
Here's what we'll cover:
What Is Email Tracking Software?
Limitations of Email Tracking Software
Common Features of Email Tracking Software
Key Considerations
Email tracking software serves two related key functions for your email marketing campaigns: It provides you with valuable analytics and helps you to more precisely nurture leads. It does both of these things by tracking email open rates, click-through rates, download rates and conversions, creating a data set that allows you to closely monitor your campaigns and understand which emails are getting the best response from which potential customers.
Once you are better aware of which of your marketing materials are the most effective, you can refocus your efforts on producing more of that type of material, thus optimizing your email marketing campaigns. This helps you improve your overall sales and marketing messaging and optimize customer/lead engagement.
Email tracking software can also alert you to the exact moment a prospect opens, clicks on or downloads that material, so you can follow up at the perfect time. Thus, it helps you generally improve communications with prospects, since you can keep a detailed list of their engagement with your emails and track just how much of your material they've actually read.
Email tracking software integrates directly with your email system so it can automatically become a part of all the emails you send. Many systems function by creating a small, invisible image within the email that contains tracking pixels. When those pixels load, that information is sent back to your tracking database, notifying it that the email has been opened.
For systems that function in this way, there are a few potential limitations:
Email open rate tracking | Monitor the success of individual email campaigns by measuring the frequency with which prospects open emails. |
Click-through rate tracking | Track the success of individual embedded links in emails by measuring the frequency with which prospects click on them. |
Download tracking | Determine the success of individual email attachments by measuring the frequency with which prospects download them. |
Conversion tracking | Keep track of how many leads convert into customers through your marketing campaigns and create similar marketing materials for future campaigns. |
Alerts | Set up the software to alert you when a prospect engages in a particular activity—opening an email, clicking a link, downloading an attachment etc.—so that you can schedule a follow-up at the best time. |
Reporting and analytics | The software provides reports (and in some cases dashboards) that give you all of the tracking information sent to the database, and can also provide custom-designed visual representations of the data. |
Email marketing and scheduling | Most email tracking software will either be one component of, or an add-on to, your larger email marketing software platform, which will allow you to schedule emails based in part on the reports and analytics that your tracking has generated. |
A reports page in MPZMail
Other factors to take into consideration when picking the best email tracking software for your business include: