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.
Sales in the 80’s: What can we learn?
I was born into a family of entrepreneurs. My father started his IT Networking company in a small office out of in our garage in Northern California. Seventeen years later, he is still committed as the first day in our garage. What was originally a one man show has since developed into a team of fifty out of Bishop Ranch Business Park in San Ramon, California. But behind every successful man is a successful women. She not only is an incredible mother, but she was the catalyst of my father's startup. My mother is the ideal, hardworking salesperson.
Without her, my father's energy to create an innovative, technology driven company and the resources behind him would not have all come together. People seem to forget that salespeople, and not necessarily the CEO or founder, are the ones who help funnel the growth of any given company, product, or idea. My mother helps prove that “a company is only as good as its people." Needless to say, my mom has endured years of selling in good and bad economies and has been a key component of my father’s success at his company.
Silicon Valley History
My mother started working in Silicon Valley in 1985. At this time Silicon Valley was booming and exciting. Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple, and many more companies were starting up. HP and IBM were already established as the companies to beat.
Most of the entrepreneurs in the valley came from Stanford, and other local California Educational Institutions. Women in sales were a minority at that time in Silicon Valley. The fax machine had just been purchased at my mother’s company and they considered it a marvel to get a "Purchase Order" from a customer within the same day, as opposed to waiting for the US Postal System. Most communication, contracts, Master Service Agreements and Purchase Orders that took as long as 5-7 days through the US Mail system. It was just not as instantaneous as selling today.
Most sales were closed via phone calls and face-to-face meetings, and most appointments were set up by calling the customer from desk phones.
Selling was all relationship-based and you scheduled many lunches and dinners with your clients. The sale was generally written on a cocktail napkin.
Email communication was just starting up, and there was no internet to speak of in the 1980s. The carphone was considered a luxury: you could close a sale while driving to and from work and at the same time check in on your family on your two hour commute. My mother emphasized that most salespeople worked until 10PM at night and enjoyed it. It was necessary to work long hours to reach your sales goals for your company.
Working at that time was considered a career, not a job. Multi-tasking was the key to success at that time. There was no wireless phones and no corner Starbucks to work from. There was no telecommuting. There was no email communication, no software applications to track your sales and your customers, and no websites or social media on the horizon. Programmers were in high demand and considered "Gods” in that time period. You were expected to complete cold calls (100-200 daily) and schedule many outside meetings day after day. There was no Wireless Infrastructure or video conferencing, WEbX, or "Gotomeeting." No Google, no YouTube, blogging, or texting. And not to mention no ToutApp.
It was not a 24x7 real time world like it is today, and you were not constantly being interrupted or distracted as in today's fast-paced, complicated business world. As someone who sold in the 1980s and was lucky to live and be a part of Silicon Valley 's emergence in all its glory, I found the growing technology fascinating.
Today, technology is able to do so much more. We are far more interconnected globally than we were decades ago. We are able to reach a larger audience, more companies, and more decision makers in any given week. Entrepreneurs can grow their company in 1-2 years, rather than 10 years. More entrepreneurs have a chance to be just that.
What can we learn?
Although the art of sales has evolved over decades and had to change alongside its technology, it will continue to evolve at an even faster pace. A salesperson must always be ready to adapt... and they typically do, due to their resilience, drive, and passion for their work. Even if you are one of those in sales that do not consider yourselves as "technically savvy" just remember what really matters: where there is a will, there is a way. And in order for a company to truly be successful, they must have a strong, passionate, and hungry salesforce to bring them to success. A good salesperson has conviction that what they are offering will greatly add to the prospects’ life, belief that this is the best offer the prospect can choose and determination to communicate that they are right.