Want to discover exactly who and how many people opened your emails?

Direct email marketing is an effective tool for reaching customers with the latest information about your company.

However, it is important to know exactly how your emails are being received so that you can ensure that your campaign is producing the results you want. That’s where ClickMeter steps in.

This powerful marketing tool allows you to see who is opening your emails and how many people are responding to your direct marketing campaigns.

So let’s take some time to look at what ClickMeter can do for you and why our tool should be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy:

Using an email tracking pixel to find out who opens your messages

By now, you may be familiar with how a tracking pixel work. If not, take some time to review this process, which serves as the bedrock of our service. With some very basic programming skills, you can use this same method to track emails as easily as you can track visitors to your website.

As with any other tracking pixel, start by creating a new pixel using our web-based interface. A new pixel will be created that looks something like this:
<img height=’0′ width=’0′ alt=” src=’http://9nl.be/kcui’ />

Now, in order to adapt this tracking pixel to email tracking rather than standard website traffic tracking, we need to make a small modification. We need to add a parameter to the HTML code.

The email tracking specific code should look like this:
<img height=’0′ width=’0′ alt=” src=’http://9nl.be/kcui?email=recipientemail’ />

Now, keep in mind, “?email” is static, and “recipientemail” should be changed dynamically so that it actually refers to the specific email address of the recipient. This will take some additional programming work, but it is a standard skill for developers and can be done quickly.

Once you have that completed, simply insert the modified tracking pixel code into your email and you are done! Now, your emails will be tracked and can be viewed in the Top Parameter Report within your ClickMeter dashboard.

How do I find out who converted?

Once you set up an email tracking pixel, you can easily know who converted (subscribed, purchased, downloaded, etc.) after receiving your email. Just associate the pixel to the right conversion code before you include it in your email campaign.

Here is a short video that explains how to create a conversion code and track your conversions with ClickMeter:

IMPORTANT: Since conversion tracking is based on cookies. If the email is opened using an email desktop client, such as Outlook, the cookie is not created and the conversion is not recorded. That is why it’s preferable to associate the conversion to the tracking link that is embedded in the call to action, rather than the tracking pixel.

Tracking link click-throughs within the email body

Tracking link click-throughs within the body of your emails is simple as well. Instead of a tracking pixel, create a tracking link. When you receive the tracking link code, make the same “?email” modification that you made with the tracking pixel. Follow the same instructions above and you are done!

The benefits of email tracking

As with all of our tracking services, email tracking provides invaluable data that equips you to modify and innovate your campaigns moving forward.

Email tracking connects you to your customers cheaply and efficiently. But an email is only useful if your customers open it and act upon it. Let’s consider possible scenarios and look into how ClickMeter’s tracking features can help you improve the situation:

Scenario 1:
You have been sending out emails, but you feel they aren’t reaping you results. In order to gather data to back up your hunch, you start tracking who is opening your emails using ClickMeter.

If your worst fears and confirmed and you realize that most of your emails remain unopened – and presumably deleted immediately – it is likely that in this case, your emails are being perceived as spam.

Thankfully, there are ways to make your emails more personal, like using dynamic personalization to address each recipient by name. By using the data that ClickMeter provides, you can modify your email marketing campaign in order to make it more effective.

Scenario 2
When tracking your email campaigns, you’ll know which emails are successful and opened by lots of potential customers. You’ll also know which ones were ignored by your audience.

With this data, you can look at the subject line of your emails to see what engaged your email list and what went unnoticed. Often a good subject line can make a huge difference. Then you can optimize future newsletters with this information in mind.

Scenario 3
You have been using ClickMeter’s email tracking pixel to see who opens your emails. Though they are being opened, you are concerned because you have found that there is not a corresponding increase in website traffic.

To get to the bottom of this, you include link tracking in your emails and discover that while your emails are being opened, people are not clicking on your links.

In this instance, perhaps the content of the email is not compelling enough to encourage click-throughs. Or maybe your only link is generic and lands on the home page instead of a specific page that is relevant to the content of your email.

Again, ClickMeter’s insights give you the information you need to improve your email campaigns.

Scenario 4
Your email campaign received a lot of opens, a lot of clicks but not so many conversions – maybe even none at all.

This can mean two things:

• Your conversion process does not work properly – something technical may be wrong or broken
• Or your offer is not aligned with the message in your email campaign and you are not delivering what you offered in the email

Again, this knowledge will let you identify if and where there’s a problem in your sales funnel – and then you can set about fixing it.

Considering how simple email tracking is with ClickMeter, it is a great way to jump-start your direct marketing efforts with very small time investment. And like all of ClickMeter’s many applications, email tracking provides you with the kind of real, actionable data that drives effective marketing.

Related Reading:

• How to track email conversions
• What is opt-in email marketing?
• Spam trigger words to avoid in email subject lines
• What is conversion tracking?

This blog post is about:

• What is an email tracking pixel
• Who opened my email
• Track email opens
• How to use an email tracking pixel