Email Tracking 101: Everything you ever wanted to know
Tout helps you track the day-to-day emails you send from Gmail and Outlook in real time. We see this as a way for senders to learn more about who's interested in your emails and use that information to improve your communications.
The principles around email tracking are relatively simple -- however after perfecting our technology over nearly a two-year period, we've found that the devils in the details and edge cases.
We get a lot of questions around the ins and outs of email tracking, so here's a primer on the four different types of tracking we offer and how to use them.
View Tracking
What it means: We'll tell you when a recipient opens an email you sent them.
How to use it: Send an email from our website, or hit the "Tout It" button in Gmail or Outlook.
How it works: We track email opens by placing an invisible image inside the emails you send. Any recipients who have enabled in their email client will show up as having viewed your email.
Now, here's the catch. If your recipient does not have images enabled, we won't register a view. While Tout tracking tries to capitalize on all images in your email along with some other tricks to track views, view tracking is never 100%... so be sure to concentrate on our 3 other types of tracking!
We also work very hard to filter out your own views from this activity - even if you're using another email address of yours to test our tracking. If you're using a team account with us, too, we'll make a note when a member of your team views an email.
For the tech curious, Tout uses a combination of browser cookies and IP addresses to track engagement around your emails.
Best practices: Put an important image (a screenshot, logo, chart, or graph) that encourages your users to enable images. You'll get much better tracking that way!
Related FAQs:
- How does Tout's tracking work?
- The person I sent a Touted email to already responded to me. Why isn't Tout saying they opened my email?
- Why does it look like someone is viewing my email over and over again?
- Tout got the location wrong for my recipients. What happened?
- How do I see which people opened or clicked on a link from a template?
- Why am I seeing that I viewed my own email?
Click Tracking
What it means: We'll tell you when someone clicks on a link in your email.
How to use it: Send an email from our website, or hit the "Tout It" button in Gmail or Outlook.
How it works: We'll convert all your links to tracking links so you'll know when your recipients click on them and what they click on.
Best practices: Put a call to action at the end of your email in link form - have your recipient go to a page on your website, fill out a form, or access a public calendar of yours to schedule a phone call. Then you'll be able to see who is interested and be able to follow up with them accordingly.
Related FAQs:
- How does Tout's tracking work?
- How do I turn off those go.toutapp.com links?
- How do I see which people opened or clicked on a link from a template?
Site Tracking
What it means: We'll tell you when someone you emailed visits your website.
How to use it: Site Tracking requires you to place a Google Analytics-like script on your website. First, you'll need to be on our Startup plan or higher. Then you can head over here and follow the instructions to paste the Javascript code into your website.
How it works:
- You send an email to a recipient. They view it or click on a link.
- They visit your website, now or in the future.
- We'll track where on your site they're paging around and display it in the Live Feed. Site tracking is fairly similar to click tracking, except it doesn't require a recipient to click on a link in your email. If a lead types your website into their browser two weeks after you've sent them an email and they never responded, you'll know when that happens.
Best practices:
If you have a special campaign running on your site, make sure to paste your tracking code there. We also recommend tracking behavior on your pricing pages, about us, product tour, or any sort of sign up form. You can even set up Site Tracking Actions to know when they make a purchase or sign up for your service.
Related FAQs:
Attachment and Presentation Tracking
What it means: You'll be able to learn when your recipients are viewing, paging through, or downloading a presentation or file you've shared with them.
How to use it: Click the "Link" or "Link to File" button in Gmail or toutapp.com (coming soon to Outlook). Send your emails out through Tout and pull up the Live Feed.
How it works: We'll upload your attachment to Tout servers and add tracking information to it. Attachment and presentation tracking works with PDFs, Word docs, and Powerpoint presentations. As recipients click through to your attachment, we'll tell you in your Live Feed how they are engaging with your content right down to the slide they keep staring at.
Best practices: Use it! If you've uploaded a Powerpoint, you'll see what pages your recipients keep coming back to, or which pages cause them to lose interest. You can use this to tailor your follow-up and also make changes to the documents themselves.
ToutApp User of the Week: Jason Hitchcock loves ToutApp
Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Jason Hitchcock, Head of Advertiser Sales at Aarki. Every week or so, we'll profile a different person who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.
I work as the head of Advertiser Sales for Aarki, a global mobile ad network that gives advertisers and publishers more control and better returns on mobile campaigns. We spend a lot of time on outreach. Before Tout I was spending a lot of my time typing up the same email and firing it off. I felt as though I was shooting my emails off into the abyss and I wondered if my time was being used productively. Then I discovered Tout.
Tout let’s me get a lot more time out of my own team. My salespeople can be selling instead of focusing on the mechanics of selling.
How do you use Tout?
- Tout’s view, click, engagement and website tracking has helped me to follow up with the right prospects at the right time
- Tout Templates have eliminated the tedious task of copying and pasting those repetitive emails I used to send
- ToutApp lets me create auto follow-ups and even email campaigns
- Tout has allowed us to do a greater volume of outreach - two weeks of work is now done in a day
I would recommend ToutApp to anybody that is a position at a company where they are doing outbound communication or where they are pitching an idea. You want to know if somebody is connecting with your email, and ToutApp gives you a nice peek at that.
How We Saved $5K By Creating Our Own Product Videos
You can always whip out the flip camera, shoot some action and upload it to YouTube for free. Or you can always use a video production company to produce and edit a quality video for around $4k to $10k. So, you are either saving bundles of money creating a not so high quality finished product or emptying your bank account with a polished professional video. Although both options would result in a finished video realistically you are either wasting your time or wasting your money. So, over here at ToutApp we found a happy medium. By using the following tools and resources below we saved big bucks and ended up with some quality videos.
If I could hug Screenflow I would.
Screenflow offers screencasting and screen recordings. It captures the entirety of content on your Mac desktop, your iphone, video camera, microphone and even your computers audio. Screenflow is super simple, easy to use and offers powerful editing allowing you to easily add images, text, video transitions even freehand callouts, annotations, video and audio filters and more. It can be difficult to create an explainer video of your product or software or service but screenflow, I kid you not, makes it effortless. And when you are ready to ship it out, Screenflow let’s you publish it to any media player (i.e., youtube, vimeo, flash, exports to any quicktime format). Don’t believe me check out their overview video.
Seriously, round of applause for Wistia.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wistia they provide professional video hosting offering reliable delivery and professional tracking. While I am sure their services are phenomenal, their content is extraordinary. As a religious reader of the Wistia blog, they offers amazing content and videos that teach you unbelieveable tips and tricks on video editing, production strategy and even video marketing. We recently created our first customer testimonial video and only dropped $100 at Home Depot and Amazon to create a professional looking lighting. Props to Wistia for the tip. Check out our video below.
Tunefruit is music to my ears...literally.
Music truly makes or breaks a video and at times is the only audio throughout it. So, choosing the best music to place in your video is kinda a big deal. In order to make sure our videos stay uppity and have emotion we use Tunefruit. Tunefruit, a modern music marketplace, has a wide variety of content contributors with all kinds of great music genres. You will be sure to find some fresh picks for your marketing videos. Another great music marketplace we have used, a bit cheaper, is Audiojungle.
It’s up to you how you want to go about your video creations. In the end if you want a quality product with your vision, style at an affordable price I would highly recommend using the tools and resources above.
P.S. After you create yout awesome video, Tout it and see what kind of engagement it receives.
User of the Week: Owen uses ToutApp for Customer Development
Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Owen McGab Enaohwo, Co-founder of SweetProcess. Every week or so, we'll profile a different person who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.
My co-founders and I are working on a webapp called SweetProcess that will make it easy for entrepreneurs to scale their businesses by helping them quickly and easily create Standard Operating Procedures for their businesses. Our process will allow everyone on their team to know exactly what to do in any given situation and they can make use of the SOPs to deliver a consistent level of results to their customers.
Right now we are in the process of creating a Minimum Viable Product for SweetProcess. Before jumping straight into coding, we decided to call potential customers and interview them to find the burning problems that they have with documenting how processes work in their businesses and the exact solutions they want from a software.
My email process involves sending an email to a list of prospects in my field and having them click a link to answer a simple three-question survey. ToutApp’s analytics let me know who is interested in and who has completed the survey. From there, I have the opportunity to follow up and prioritize my recipients based on who appears to be showing interest. For example, those who complete the survey then get a phone call where we can drill into the problem and the solutions that they want from the SweetProcess software.
ToutApp’s templates, tracking, and follow-up mechanisms help me get my emails done faster and more intelligently. At the end of the day, these features help me stay in touch with everyone, from my initial outreach to my next follow-up to the final phone call.
Why Email Tracking is a big deal for Salespeople
Marketers have been obsessing over their Email Open Rates since…well.. since the beginning of Email Marketing.
With Tout Email Tracking, we brought the same "fancy" technology to everyday 1-to-1 sales emails so that salespeople could see in real-time how prospects and leads engaged with their sales emails.
Up until now, Email Tracking for Salespeople has been a well kept secret, something that gives you that "extra edge."
Email tracking may soon become a necessity rather than a luxury.
Today's article titled "Email Auto-Filtering - What's a Marketer to Do?" on a Marketing News & Expert Advice Site suggests that the rise of auto email filtering services like SaneBox and Google Smart Inbox are probably relegating those marketing emails to a folder called "Travel" rather than the person's Inbox.
Whether it's a folder or a "stack," your email marketing message has found itself tightly aligned with other email communications from competitors and other vertically aligned organizations. Many systems have default categorizations that look at a variety of information within the marketing message and the email envelope to tuck the message away neatly for the recipient.
Better Inbox management and smart filtering is something that needs to happen. These filters will get better and better to get you, me, and our leads to focus on the messages that matter and ignore the ones that don't. This is something we believe in as well.
Interestingly enough, these filters can start looking into sales emails as well. Pretty soon, I can imagine a world where your sales email will get locked out faster than a smart receptionist knows to block out cold sales calls for the CEO.
What's a salesperson to do?
Use Email Tracking. That way, instead of wondering whether that email got through and ignored or engaged, you'll know. In Real-Time, you'll know whether your email gets opened, whether your presentation gets viewed, and whether your links get clicked.
How does Email Tracking help?
Obviously, being that Tout Tracking provides all this functionality, we're a little biased. But, don't just take our word for it. Here's what Jeanne Burns had to say about Tout's real-time tracking on our recent DIYMarketers article "ToutApp Does Email Marketing Like Never Before":
Here is something even more critical. Here is how Tout’s real time analytics will improve your ability to close sales. That important email you sent two days ago, to the client you are dying to connect with was opened an hour ago. They looked at it for twelve minutes. They clicked on the links. Now is the perfect time to follow up with a phone call. Strike while the iron is hot. Increase the impact and improve your chances of closing that sale. Is there any other way to do this? None that I’m aware of.