Ever wanted to know how your internal emails perform after you send them? With email tracking, you can monitor email performance to measure and boost employee engagement!
With so many emails competing for your employees’ attention, how can you be sure that your communications are getting their time in the spotlight?
An email tracking system gives you the power to see how your recipients engage with your emails (or whether they’re engaging at all). With a data-based approach to email development, you can create content that your employees actually want to read.
Not sure where to start? We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about effective email tracking and break down how to use email tracking tools step by step.
What is Email Tracking?
Email tracking is the process of monitoring and measuring how recipients engage with your emails. The data you collect can be used to conduct an internal communications audit, set employee engagement KPIs, and improve your internal communications more broadly.
Learning how to track an email in Outlook or Gmail is simple.
With the help of an email tracking tool, you can monitor emails going out from your inbox and access a number of email analytics. These include, individual open rate, click-through rate, opens by device and location, read time, and more.
How Does Email Tracking Software Work?
An email tracking software works by monitoring the performance of each email sent from your inbox. This can be done through individual or aggregated email metrics.
Once recipients begin to engage with your emails, you’ll be able to see performance metrics either in a tab next to the email or through a separate analytics dashboard.
When you send an email using ContactMonkey‘s email tracking tool, a small, invisible tracking pixel is inserted into the email content. This measures and sends tracking data back to the tracking software.
With ContactMonkey, all of your engagement metrics will be available in an easy-to-use analytics dashboard. You’ll even be able to sort, segment, and compare performance across different email campaigns.
Benefits of Email Tracking Software
There are many benefits to email tracking. However, the particular advantages you experience will depend on your business goals and communication objectives. Here are just a few benefits of email tracking to consider:
Better/professional communication content/designs
Email tracking can help you see which types of content and designs are most engaging for recipients. In turn, you can develop a more informed email design process and test out different sorts of content, subject lines, and layouts.
Makes Outlook and Gmail better
Email tracking enhances your existing email workflow by integrating with the email platforms you already know and love. Except now, you also have data to guide and improve your content creation process.
Improve/Increase employee engagement
Metrics like email open rates, read times, and click-through rates tell you a lot about how your audience is engaging with your content. By looking at what’s working and what’s not, you can curate better email content that leads to greater engagement.
Gather employee feedback
A great email tracking tool gives you more than just opens and clicks. With tools like ContactMonkey, you can tap into employee engagement metrics as well. Email-embedded pulse surveys and anonymous comments provide you with additional insights to inform your content development process.
Optimize internal email campaigns
Are mobile users engaging less with your company newsletters? Do employees in your Australia office click through your emails less than those in other locations? The best email tracking software will pinpoint these issues quickly and allow you to troubleshoot and optimize campaigns faster.
Save time
Without knowing if your email was received, you may try to create more of the same content, in hopes of increasing awareness. The best Gmail and Outlook email tracking tool will save you time by revealing whether your communications were received, and whether they were interesting to readers. With ContactMonkey, you’ll know who read your email, what they clicked on, and where improvements are necessary.
How Can Email Tracking Help Your Business?
Both individuals and businesses can reap benefits from using email tracking software. The value of email tracking lies in its ability to help us understand the interests and preferences of email recipients.
When it’s possible to see whether an email was received, how readers engaged with it, and who it resonated with the most, we can make strategic improvements. But that’s just half the story.
Here are a few specific use cases for email tracking in your business:
Internal communications
With internal email tracking, you can learn when employees receive your communications as well as how they interact with them. This is important for employee engagement rates, but it’s also crucial for crisis management. Effective email tracking can let you know when employees received an urgent alert and it gives you peace of mind regarding employee safety.
HR communications
HR teams have a lot on their plate. Especially if there’s no dedicated internal communications team to offer support. When writing newsletters, delivering company updates, and managing new employees all falls on busy human resource teams, an email tracking system can be a huge help. HR teams can see when employees received benefits enrollment information, which onboarding resources employees find most helpful, and which events get the most registrations.
Internal marketing
This type of marketing focuses on improving employee engagement and retention, boosting workplace morale, and developing brand promoters. An email tracking tool lets you conduct an internal marketing audit and see the impact of your employee engagement efforts. With email analytics, you’ll know how many of your employees are reading key company announcements, learning about product updates, and checking career development resources.
Sales and business development
Email analytics can help you determine the quality of your email list and subscriber engagement. The best email marketing tools offer advanced campaigns with plenty of options for personalization, segmentation, and email analytics. Other tools might stand out precisely due to their simplicity.
E-commerce
Email marketing and sales software with embedded email tracking can help generate new clients and purchases. By seeing customer engagement trends, organizations can set informed KPIs and develop a tailored email marketing strategy to meet their goals faster.
How to Track an Email in Outlook Using ContactMonkey
With ContactMonkey, tracking an email in Outlook is simple. After you’ve installed ContactMonkey’s Outlook email tracking software, follow these steps:
Step 1: Enter Outlook and click the ContactaMonkey icon in the ribbon menu. Then click “New Email.” You’ll see the ContactMonkey sidebar pop up.
Step 2: Use the sidebar menu to select your template of choice. It will automatically populate into your “New Email” box.
Step 3: Once you’re satisfied with your email (we recommend sending a ‘test send’ to ensure all is in order), click “Send and Track.” You’ll be able to get in-depth email analytics for your campaign. Alternatively, you can click “Send Later” to schedule your email for a later time.
Step 4: Access your ContactMonkey dashboard to see:
- Open rates
- Reading time
- Survey responses
- Click-through rates
- Event registrations
- Device used for viewing your email
- Reader location and department (with individual tracking)
How to Track an Email in Gmail Using ContactMonkey
If you rely on Gmail for your internal communications, ContactMonkey’s Gmail dashboard makes it fast and easy to schedule, send, and track your emails.
Step 1: Navigate to the Gmail dashboard within ContactMonkey:
Step 2: Fill out the various fields within the dashboard, like selecting your recipients or distribution list, adding and personalizing your subject line with merge fields, and configuring your tracking options. Then select the email that you’d like to send:
Step 3: After you’ve selected your email, you’re ready to send. You can either send immediately or schedule your email to send at a future time:
Step 4: After your email has been sent, visit the ContactMonkey dashboard to access:
- Open rates
- Reading time
- Survey responses
- Click-through rates
- Device used for viewing your email
- Reader location and department (with individual tracking)
What Can You Track with Email Tracking Software?
Depending on the type of email tracking platform you use, you’ll be able to access a range of different analytics. As mentioned, these commonly include email open rates, read times, and clicks. But with ContactMonkey, you can go several steps further.
ContactMonkey’s email tracking software for Outlook and Gmail lets you access a whole host of email metrics—from opens by device and location to employee net promoter score (eNPS).
The best part: all of the data is readily available on your very own analytics dashboard. Here are just a few things you can track using this data:
Employee surveys
With email-embedded employee feedback tools like emoji reactions, eNPS, thumbs up/down, and anonymous comments, you can gather unique insights from your employees.
While your employees get to provide input to management via email surveys, you get to gather useful insights as to what really matters to your workforce.
Corporate/Company events
Hosting an upcoming event? ContactMonkey lets you create, embed, and send event invitations and collect RSVPs.
Employees can even include comments with their RSVPs so you can get more insights about their take on your event and act on their suggestions.
Internal email campaigns
Want to find your best-performing emails? With ContactMonkey’s Compare Campaigns feature, you can select up to 10 email campaigns to compare with one another:
You’re also able to get a downloadable copy of your comparison report, which will be emailed to you when you select ‘Download Report.’
The report is easy to import into a Powerpoint along with a variety of other formats. So you can share your findings with your team and management.
Segmented email stats
If you sent your email to a distribution list in Outlook, you can also view segmented email stats by clicking the Segmented Email Stats tab:
Filter your campaign statistics by departments, job titles, and office locations to see engagement across different employee characteristics.
Reach 10,000+ employees instantly
Email at Scale is made for teams with large audiences. Engage your workforce without sending limits.
How Email Tracking Helps ContactMonkey Customers
Leading brands rely on ContactMonkey to provide them with accurate and precise email analytics.
Whether it’s gauging employee interest in a new campaign or monitoring crisis communications, our email tracking tool offers companies a data-driven approach to internal communications.
Here are just a few ways that businesses are using ContactMonkey to improve the speed, reach, and quality of their communications:
Chobani
After going remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chobani’s communications team wanted to make up for the loss of face-to-face interaction. Realizing that they needed dedicated internal communications software, the team turned to ContactMonkey.
“We knew that communications would be even more important during COVID. We wanted to have an analytics tool behind us, so that we could make some informed decisions and see if we were reaching the right audiences, at the right time.”
With the help of ContactMonkey’s email tracking system, Chobani’s team optimized their internal communications strategy and reached their dispersed audiences more effectively.
“We find ContactMonkey extremely robust and easy to use, and the analytics have been a gold mine for us,”
Cimpress
A mass customization company that produces personalized goods for businesses, Cimpress relies on ContactMonkey’s email tracking software to inform their internal email approach.
“Email tracking for us feels like a necessity. I should know how many people are opening, clicking and reacting to my emails. It ultimately ends up informing long-term planning. The email tracking tool has also helped me figure out which subject lines catch our team’s attention.”
Cimpress used email tracking to inform their email design process as well as to test out different content, designs, and subject lines to see what resonated the most with their employees.
Cortland
Cortland’s internal communications team wanted to know how many employees opened their emails, how they were engaging with them, and whether the content was actually resonating with readers.
“We needed to figure out, are our people reading this? How are they reading it? When are they reading it?
With ContactMonkey, Cortland was able to calculate open rates, click-through rates, read times, most popular clicks, and optimal send times to make informed improvements and maximize engagement with their internal content.
“It was a blessing that we signed on with ContactMonkey when we did. Through COVID, we were able to get more data because of our partnership with ContactMonkey.”
IDP Education
At IDP, the internal communications and marketing team wanted to create tailored messaging for different departments and audiences. With ContactMonkey, they were able to see how different divisions engaged with their internal communications and set KPIs accordingly.
“ContactMonkey gave us insight into what’s being read and we have drastically improved engagement with our internal communications. We can set targets and stretch targets using the learnings that we gain from the analytics.”
The team at IDP also used data to inform their email design process and create more visually engaging newsletters.
“I can go and design templates based on the learnings from the analytics.”
Alnylam pharmaceuticals
Alnylam’s internal communications team previously used a tool that failed to deliver reliable and precise email metrics, making it hard to accurately measure email performance. After persistent headaches with their old tool, the team swapped it for ContactMonkey.
“Before ContactMonkey, there were constant issues—the email tracking just wasn’t working!”
With ContactMonkey, the team was able to tap into consistent, clear, and comprehensive email tracking metrics for every email they sent out.
Improve Employee Engagement With ContactMonkey’s Email Tracking Software
A SaaS email tracking software gives you an edge by enabling you to create compelling internal emails that your employees actually want to read. You can also ensure that important information actually reaches your employees instead of their ‘Trash’ folder.
With ContactMonkey’s Gmail and Outlook email tracking too you can take your internal communications to the next level. No more guessing whether emails were successful or not; gather the data you need to improve your emails and prove the value of internal communications.
See ContactMonkey in action: book a free demo for a comprehensive demonstration of our email management software.
