If you’re using emailing as a tool to manage or grow your business, it’s essential to track your emails. It’s a treasure grove of insights to know exactly how your emails are being received and interacted with.
And when it comes to email tracking, Gmail is one of the most useful email clients to work with.
So, can you track emails with Gmail? Yes, definitely.
Not only is it possible, you also have a ton of tools and software out there that can make this easy for you. But if you really want to harness the benefits of Gmail email tracking, some tools can get you there faster, like Mailmeteor. But more on that later…
First, let’s talk about some of the benefits of email tracking in Gmail, how Gmail email tracking works, what gets tracked, and how you can start doing it the right way for maximum effectiveness. We’ll talk about:
- The Benefits of Email Tracking
- How Gmail Email Tracking Works
- Best Gmail Email Tracking Tool
- What Information Can You Track?
- How to Track Your Gmail Emails
- Conclusion
Let’s get started!
The Benefits of Email Tracking
Email tracking offers valuable benefits for businesses as well as individuals growing their sales, network, or preparing for projects and events. Some of the gains from email tracking for you can be:
✅ Allowing you to analyze your open rates
“What’s wrong with my open rate? Is it my subject line? My timing? Or my audience?” It won’t matter if you’re not tracking those emails. Tracking Gmail emails gives you access to your email’s performance, opened or not. Why is that so important?
- It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your subject lines.
- It helps you to identify which segments of your audience are most engaged.
- It sets up the stage for you to leverage follow-ups.
- It’s the precursor to tracking your link clicks.
- It can help you to improve your overall email marketing results.
✅ Helping you to identify which subject lines are most effective
Why is your email subject important?
The very first thing that recipients see can make or break the success of your email. A captivating and compelling subject line can entice recipients to open the email and engage with the content inside, while a lackluster subject line can cause the email to be ignored or deleted.
The perfect subject should be clear, concise, relevant, attention-grabbing, and create a sense of urgency or curiosity. They also play a crucial role in deliverability and provide the opportunity to personalize and segment emails for greater relevance and effectiveness.
Take the below example. Say you want to announce an offer:
See how tweaking your subject line can widely affect your score?
Test your subject using our email subject line tester, it will help you find the perfect line in no time!
✅ Seeing which emails are resonating with your audience, and which ones are not
Why is it crucial to have this level of insight?
Understanding which emails are resonating with your audience and which ones are falling short is pivotal for the success of your email marketing efforts. It’s like having a secret weapon to unlock the full potential of your audience and achieve your desired results.
Imagine being able to tap into your audience’s preferences and interests, crafting emails that truly speak to them and leave a lasting impact. With this knowledge, you can unveil patterns and trends in their behavior so you can create content that is not only relevant but also engaging, captivating, and time it perfectly for maximum engagement and conversions. Effective driving conversions, and unlocking more potential for your email marketing strategy.
✅ Leveraging Gmail email tracking to double down on follow-ups
Getting open rates but low(no) replies?
Follow-up, not just once or twice. In sales, 50% of closed deals happen after the 5th follow-up, yet 44% of salespeople give up after one.
Same applies to recipients who clicked on links or engaged with your content. If you want to make things happen, you have to chase them. You can always automate your follow-ups and skyrocket your replies with minimal effort using these 3 easy ways
✅ Giving you insights on which links are most popular
This information is invaluable in shaping your email marketing strategy, by focusing on the types of links that are getting clicked you build an understanding of how your recipients are engaging with your content and why (why not?)
For example: if you notice that your audience is more likely to click on links that are related to a particular topic, you can create more content on that topic to engage them further.
So, by using Gmail email tracking, you turn your clicks into actionable data, and get to test different types of links: text, images, and buttons, to see which ones gets more engagement to improve your link click rate, conversion rate, and overall email campaigns.
✅ Helping you hone in on your email marketing strategy
Getting all those decisive and critical data points means you have so much insight and key figures to shift your content when you need to, ultimately optimizing that strategy and scoring those results you set out for.
So, you see how vital email tracking is?
Now that we’ve covered the why, you might be wondering how tracking works for your emails…
How Gmail email tracking works
Email tracking is quite basic (so to speak).
The tracking system works by adding a tiny invisible image (1x1 pixel) inside your email, that sends a request to a server when the email is opened.
This can includes information such as the recipient’s IP address, the time the email was opened, and sometimes device/email client being used.
Some tracking software also uses unique identifiers, such as cookies, to track additional engagement metrics. This information can be used to create more targeted and personalized email marketing campaigns.
Link tracking, on the other hand, works by adding a unique identifier to each hyperlink included in an email message. When a recipient clicks on a tracked link in the email, the unique identifier is triggered, allowing the email sender to track when and how many times the link was clicked.
It’s important to note that Email providers (such as Apple Mail or Gmail) are blocking “pixel trackers” for privacy reasons - with the idea to block as much as they can all tracking technologies. This only impacts the accuracy of opens tracking. To learn more about email tracking, check out this link.
While tracking email opens can provide some insight into the effectiveness of an email campaign, it's not always a reliable metric for several reasons.
Firstly, not all email clients automatically display images or enable the tracking pixel, which means that even if a recipient opens an email, the open may not be recorded. This can result in an artificially low open rate and an inaccurate reflection of how many people actually engaged with the email. Some other email clients download emails by default, triggering the pixel tracker and causing false opens.
Secondly, even if an email is opened, it doesn't necessarily mean that the recipient read or engaged with the content. They may have simply opened the email and quickly closed it without taking any action.
For these reasons, it's more important to track engagement rates, such as reply rates or bounce rates, which provide a more accurate picture of how recipients are interacting with an email campaign. A high reply rate indicates that recipients are interested in the content and are actively engaging with the sender, while a high bounce rate suggests that the email campaign may need some adjustments to improve its effectiveness.
Additionally, tracking engagement rates can help identify potential issues, such as problems with email deliverability or issues with the content or targeting of the email campaign. By closely monitoring engagement rates, you can make data-driven decisions and optimize you email campaigns for maximum effectiveness.
Last but not least, turning off tracking in email can help improve your email deliverability by reducing the risk of emails being marked as spam or blocked by email filters.
Some email clients and ISPs have algorithms in place that can identify emails with tracking pixels or other tracking codes as potential spam or phishing attempts, which can negatively impact your deliverability. Turning off tracking can also help protect user privacy by preventing email senders from collecting data on recipients' behavior and interactions with the email. By respecting your recipients' privacy and avoiding tactics that can trigger spam filters, you can build trust with your recipients and improve the overall success of your email campaigns!
Best Gmail email tracking tool
We’ll save you a ton of Google searches: Mailmeteor 🔥.
There are a few dozen Gmail productivity add-ons and tools on the market, but very few can bring together mail-merge with attachments, personalization, filtering, scheduling, autopilot sending, importing HTMLs, integrations with your CRM platforms, AND email tracking.
Not only does Mailmeteor do all of the above, it does it beautifully, with productivity in mind, and centered around privacy.
It ticks all the boxes of what an email productivity tool should be/do, and does even more. If you’re looking for Gmail email tracking, don’t settle for any lesser capabilities. Tracking is a paid feature though, but you’ll find the pricing is well worth the tiny investment.
What information can you track?
Within Mailmeteor’s arsenal of powerful email productivity tools, you get real-time email tracking for your campaigns which feeds your tracking dashboard with the below info:
- SENT: Mailmeteor have sent your email with success.
- OPENED: the email was opened by one of your recipients.
- CLICKED: a link inside your email has been clicked.
- BOUNCED: the email bounced back, the recipient didn't receive the email.
- REPLIED: your recipient replied to the email.
- UNSUBSCRIBED: your recipient opted-out from your email communications.
How to track your Gmail emails?
Email tracking comes enabled with paid plans. You can toggle this on or off in 1 click, and access your report in 2 clicks!
How to enable tracking and get reports on Google Sheets
If you want to tick this one off from the Mailmeteor for Google Sheets add-on, you can find it under options below:
When sending emails with Google Sheets, you’ll find a “Merge status” column added to your spreadsheet. You’ll also get a tracking report as a sidebar on the right with summarized info about clicks and opens.
To access it, open the tracking report from “Extensions” > “Mailmeteor” > “Tracking report”
How to manage tracking and reports from the Mailmeteor Dashboard
You can set tracking from your Mailmeteor Dashboard by toggling track emails in your settings panel.
On the Mailmeteor Dashboard, you can access campaign reports from the Campaigns overview, by clicking on one of your campaigns titles.
If you want in detail information about email tracking with Mailmeteor, check out this Real-time Tracking support page.
Conclusion
Tracking your Gmail emails gives you layers of insights that can take turn your email campaigns from simple one-way communications to high-converting optimized lead sources.
Many email marketing tools out there can get the job done, as we said there are no shortages of email marketing software and gimmicks.
If you’re using Gmail (as you should), we can list dozens of add-ons that can help with your Gmail email tracking, but some are just built different. Like Mailmeteor. Built specifically to change your Gmail game.
Lastly, while tracking email opens can provide some insights into the performance of an email campaign, it’s not always a reliable metric due to factors such as image blocking. Therefore, it’s also important to focus on tracking engagement rates, such as reply rates or bounce rates, as they provide a more accurate picture of how recipients are interacting with your email campaign.
With Mailmeteor you can Save time sending emails, Send hundreds of personalized emails with Gmail, and Track emails in real time.
