Today we’re reviewing how to track your emails using an Outlook Read Receipt and Outlook Email Tracking and comparing it to the Outlook Delivery Receipt.
Outlook Read Receipt
The Outlook read receipt has been around since Outlook 2000 and has been an instrumental feature helping users know what happened to their emails after they hit send. However the Outlook read receipt has been superseded by Outlook’s new email tracking. Why has the Outlook Read Receipt been pushed to the curb? Simple. This is the notice the recipient of your email gets when you attach an Outlook Read Receipt with your email:
This seems quite intrusive, don’t you think? How many times do you think the recipients of your emails would click ‘Yes’? Probably very few, correct? That’s why Outlook’s new email tracking is the way to go.
Outlook Email Tracking
Outlook Email Tracking is much more powerful than an Outlook Read Receipt. When you’re tracking your Outlook emails you will see:
- If your email gets opened
- How many times your email gets opened
- Where your email gets opened
- What device was used to open your email
Why is this important? Simple. When you start to see your email getting opened multiple times in many locations you know the recipient has shown great interest in what you wrote. If it was a sales proposal you could pick up the phone and hopefully close the deal! Outlook Email Tracking makes you money.
So how easy is Outlook email tracking to use? It’s ridiculously easy. Right after you set it up you will see a new section in your Outlook ribbon with these 2 new options:
- Track Email
- Track Hyperlinks
Simply ensure both of those options are ticked before you hit the Send button. It looks like this in Outlook:
As soon as your emails start to be opened you will get notified in your new sidebar on the right side of Outlook. It looks like this:
In the example above you can see 1 of my emails was opened twice. Once in San Francisco using an iPhone and once in Toronto using Outlook. These stats get updated throughout the day as more of your emails get opened. This information will help you identify what happened to your emails after hitting the send button.
Outlook Delivery Receipts
An Outlook delivery receipt confirms delivery of your email to the recipient’s mailbox, however unlike the Outlook read receipt and Outlook email tracking the Outlook delivery receipt can’t confirm that the recipient has seen it or opened it.
It’s very easy to attach a delivery receipt to your outgoing email. You can setup Outlook to attach delivery receipts to every outgoing email but that would overload your inbox with notifications! So for this example we will show you how to manually attach a delivery receipt to a new email.
Step 1 – Compose a new email
Step 2 – Click on the Options tab, then in the Tracking group, select the Request a Delivery Receipt check box.
Step 3 – Send the email on its way!
Are you ready to start tracking your emails using Outlook email tracking?
