Email tracking – what is it, who needs it and how it will help business

Although the world is growing with new communication channels, when it comes to, for example, b2b, we find ourselves in a zone of some conservatism.

The reason for this is the specifics of the segment. B2B is characterized by:

high average bill,
long sales cycle,
small amount of traffic.
Communication in b2b is appropriate: asking for an estimate in a chat or dictating product numbers over the phone is, to put it mildly, not very convenient. Therefore, communication via e-mail is still typical for this segment.

And since they write to the mail, the marketer needs to conduct advertising campaigns and analytics taking into account the email. This is what email tracking is for. In this article, we will tell you why it is needed and how it helps business.

Find out how much it will cost you

Email-who?

Email tracking is a technology that tracks the sources of customer requests from email.

Types of email tracking
The types of email tracking are similar to the types of call tracking.

Dynamic
When site users see a unique email address. Depending on the goals, the replacement email is generated both personally for the user and for each traffic channel from which he could come.

Static
When a spoofed email address is linked to a specific traffic channel. Most often, it is used for offline advertising analytics: on outdoor banners or handouts.

How Email Tracking Works
Email tracking works on the principle of content substitution, just like call tracking. When opening a website, the user sees an email created specifically to accommodate the substitution conditions instead of the company’s official email address. When a person writes a letter to this address, the system records the request and the sender’s details: the source of the transition, the advertising campaign, the keyword, etc.

how does email tracking work

The “old-fashioned” way to set up spoof email addresses is to break into the site code and manually write all the conditions for spoofing the email. This is a long, labor-intensive process that requires programming skills. And this is provided that you have the ability to quickly make changes to the code.

With email tracking services, everything is simpler. For example, in Callibri, email tracking is included in the MultiTracking tool package , which is connected using 1 script in the site code. This is much easier than shoveling through all the insides of the site, and we have also prepared a set of instructions for installing the script.

After this, all information on requests from email will be sent to a special report, “Unified Lead Log,” where you can conduct analytics on more than two dozen parameters.

Read also

What results will email marketing bring: how to make a forecast
Who needs email tracking?
First of all, it is important to understand whether your business needs to enable email tracking at all?

The tool is designed for businesses where communication occurs via email. Most often, this is the b2b segment with an expensive product or service, the specifications of which cannot be conveniently and quickly discussed in a chat. That is, a coffee shop or flower shop often does not make sense to set up email tracking.

Areas where email tracking will be useful:

real estate,
legal services,
financial services,
tourism,
education,
automobile business,
industry,
cargo transportation.
But in reality, everything is individual. If you understand that you have applications from e-mail, track them. Otherwise, you will not see the full result of advertising campaigns.

Read also

How a Countdown Timer in an Email Affects Click Rate and Conversion: Test Results
Why Email Tracking Is Useful
Correctly configured email tracking solves several problems.

Accounting of applications
Oddly enough, some people don’t see the full picture and may make judgments about advertising while missing leads in a customer’s inbox.

This was the case with the digital agency Toogarin, where before connecting email tracking, the client missed 76 applications from email during the reporting period.

Without tracking, applications from mail may be missed

Missed leads are bad enough, but they also set off a chain of other advertising analytics errors.

In this particular case, missed applications affected the calculation of the cost of a lead. Without taking email into account, the cost of a lead increased almost twofold , loan database which radically changed the conclusions about the quality of advertising and future plans for optimization.

loan database

email tracking allows you to track requests from email

Needless to say, after connecting email tracking the situation changed?

Classification of appeals
Email tracking helps classify email inquiries. Remember that not every email is a lead. Spam, cooperation offers, control the crawling and show what you have newsletters, etc. end up in your inbox. Email tracking reports allow you to quickly and clearly evaluate the quality of leads.

This was done in the case of the agency “Skill-to-lead”, betting email list where they tracked the sources from which the letters came. Checking the report of the unified lead log, marketers looked through the content of the emails and gave them a grade.

Based on this data, we recorded non-targeted leads and adjusted advertising campaigns, and also found applications whose receipts covered advertising costs for months in advance.

It turned out that half of the company’s target requests (311 out of 606) were received via email. Without tracking, the agency would never have known this.

 

What is CRM Marketing

Why Email Tracking Might Not Work
Email tracking is not a magic wand that will instantly make an advertising campaign explosive. This is a common mistake marketers make: they think that once they connect the script, their work is done.

The tool will record the request and collect the data in a report, and then it’s up to the person. Analysis, analytics, conclusions, optimization of advertising campaigns – all this will have to be done independently.

Let’s sum it up
You need to approach working with any tool consciously, otherwise by the end of the reporting period you will not see any results except a wasted budget and an incomprehensible table with some data.

Installing a script just to have it is an even bigger mistake than not installing it at all. Assess the need for email tracking and, if it is obvious, launch the tool.

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