What is Email Tracking?

In the never-ending quest to find the best offers on products we need and want, shopping by email has become a popular option. Between the convenience of online shopping and the countless retailers sending out offers daily, it's easy to understand why.

Email marketing is an essential tool for any business. When used correctly, it can prove to be extremely effective at generating interest and supporting business growth. But if you want to maximize your return on investment, you need to ensure that your emails are impacting your business goals.

Consider using email tracking to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your email campaigns. With the right analysis tools and a little bit of trial and error, you can begin to see which emails are performing better than others and which methods of email marketing are helping you reach your audience.

What is Email Tracking?

Put simply, email tracking is the measurement and collection of data from email marketing campaigns. It can be an extremely useful tool for businesses of all sizes, across all industries. Whether you're just getting started or you already have a functional email marketing program in place, you can begin to see the benefits of tracking emails.

Traditionally, email marketing has been considered 'best practice' and it is often recommended that businesses implement analytics software as part of their email marketing strategy. But as we've established, not all businesses are created equal, and neither are their marketing strategies. So for some businesses, the data that comes from using a traditional email platform might not be applicable or useful.

Because of this, and the fact that not all businesses have the resources to implement other types of data collection methods, email tracking is becoming a must have for every marketer, content creator, and business owner.

Why Should You Track Email Campaigns?

If you've been paying attention to marketing trends, you'll know that the role of the data scientist is on the rise. Thanks in large part to the explosion of online marketing tools that are now available, measuring and analyzing data has become a routine activity for experienced marketers and digital marketers alike. With that in mind, here are a few reasons why you should track your email campaigns.

1. To Improve Open Rates & Click-Throughs

Whether you've been in digital marketing for a while or are just diving into the industry, one of the most basic and important metrics to track is the open rates and click-throughs on your emails. Basically, if a potential customer is opening your email and taking the time to click on a call-to-action (CTA), that's a good thing.

If someone is opening your email but doesn't appear to be taking the time to read it, it might be because of the subject line or the first few paragraphs of the email itself. This is why the opening rate and click-through rate are significant: they provide you with a better insight into whether or not someone is taking the time to engage with your email marketing. If they're not, you might want to consider re-designing your emails to make them more enticing.

As a general rule of thumb, you should always strive to get an opening rate of at least 20% and a click-through rate of at least 5%. If not, you're losing out on a lot of business, particularly if you're running a profitable business. Remember, if they don't have an interest in what you have to offer, they're not going to click on a CTA or call you up to purchase a product.

2. To Identify Email Marketing Trends

Email marketing is a fast-paced industry and new trends emerge every day. In fact, you could argue that technology itself changes the game and the way that we interact with customers through email marketing every two months or so. This is why it's essential to keep up with the latest trends and technological advancements in your industry so that you can keep your edge in the marketplace.

For example, did you know that Instagram is one of the largest platforms for marketing and advertising professionals to get inspired by and learn from each other? Or that Youtube creators are driving the trends and influencing consumers more than ever before? If you're not keeping up, you're going to be left in the dust when those influencers publish new content.

If you want to know what's trending, you can either look it up on Twitter or you can simply check out your email inbox. Chances are, you'll be able to tell whether or not a particular trend will be effective in your industry within a few days of seeing it.

3. To Ensure That You're Always Tailoring Your Messages

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses of all sizes make is sending the same email to everyone. If you've been operating on a purely trial and error basis with no analysis of the data, you might be sending out hundreds of identical emails with the hope that one or two of them will connect with a prospective customer. But that's all about luck—you might be throwing money away because you have no idea how effective your particular sales pitch is with a particular group of people.

Before you know it, you've wasted a lot of time and effort and you haven't even made a dent in your sales goals. The fix for this is simply to track the results of your various email campaigns and, from there, determine what works and what doesn't. Armed with this new information, you can then create a more personalized and, hopefully, more profitable strategy for driving sales.

4. To Identify The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

One of the most useful things about email tracking is that it provides you with a bird's eye view of the performance of your email campaigns. In other words, you can identify the key performance indicators—the things that you need to pay attention to in order to properly gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.

As a marketer or business owner, it's your job to find the key performance indicators for your business. You can track these things manually, using an Excel spreadsheet or you can use a tool like HubSpot to create performance metrics that can be monitored, on a daily basis, from a single dashboard. If you choose the latter, you'll be able to see at a glance how your marketing efforts are doing—not just how they're performing in terms of open rates and click-throughs, but also how they're performing relative to the other campaigns being monitored.

5. To Identify The Marketing Channels That Work

Email marketing is a massive industry and it would be impossible to do it justice in a single blog post. This is why it's vital to keep up with the various platforms, tools, and tactics that make up the trade. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available and, at times, difficult to know where to start. But that's your problem—not ours. We're here to help you make sense of it all with straightforward answers to your most pressing questions.

We hope that this article has helped you understand the fundamentals of email tracking. Regardless of whether you're just getting started or you already have a functional email marketing program in place, you can begin to see the benefits of analyzing your data and tracking your emails.