You've created your message and contact list, you've created your campaign and clicked send, but it's not over yet! A key component of successful marketing is tracking audience engagement so that you can provide more of what your contacts want and less of what they don't.
MailSauce's open- and click-tracking data tells you how many people looked at your campaign, which links they clicked, and other information, like their geolocation. You can even tntegrate your Google Analytics account with MailSauce for more in-depth reporting.
Click tracking allows you to see if contacts have clicked links in your campaign. Your campaign report will show which contacts clicked your links, and how many times each link was clicked. Like open tracking, it can help measure subscriber engagement.
Each time you send one of your MailSauce campaigns, we look for any website URLs in your message and we replace them with a different URL that has been generated by the MailSauce servers. Whenever a contact clicks on the new link in your message, we'll register that as a click, and then redirect them to the correct destination (the same place the original link would've taken them). The new URLs in the message are unique to each contact so we know exactly who and when someone clicks a link.
As memtioned above, we track link clicks by replacing the original URLs with our own unqiue URLS that redirects your contacts to the correct destination. This means that contacts who view your plain-text campaigns will see the full tracking URLs, instead of the URL you typed in originally.
Before the plain-text version of your campaign is sent, links will look similar to this:
Hey there! If you didn't know already, we publish a bi-weekly blog and we just released our latest issue. Check out all the latest news here:
https://blog.mailsauce.com/blog-home/
However, when it's actually been sent and viewed by the contact it will look more like this:
Hey there! If you didn't know already, we publish a bi-weekly blog and we just released our latest issue. Check out all the latest news here:
https://app.mailsauce.com/track-link?camp_id=d44360a69cad8ef0&cont_id=139808bbd48bcf22&trli_id=a8167de8dd1e956a
Open tracking lets you keep an eye on if your contacts have opened the emails you've sent. In the analysis page, you'll be able to see an overview of statistics from all of your campaigns alongside individual reports for each campaign. A campaign report will show you which contacts opened that campaign and how many total opens the campaign received.
Each time you send one of your MailSauce campaigns, we embed a tiny invisible graphic in the bottom of your the email message. This graphic is unique to each campaign you send and unique to each contact so we know exactly who and when someone opens your email.
Graphic/pixel trafficking is the industry standard for open tracking and is a great tool to give you a general overview of your contact's engagement. Unfortunately, it does have it's limitations:
If your contacts have chosen not to display images on their email client (Gmail, outlook, etc.), the graphic won't be downloaded, and the open won't be tracked. You can ask your contacts to add you to their address book, or choose to display images in their email client to improve open tracking accuracy.
If an email message is too large, some email clients will clip content and hide it behind a 'View entire message' link. When the message is clipped, it also hides the tracking pixel that we use for tracking when people open the email. To prevent this, you'll need to reduce the size of your message to under 102kb.
Fortunately we don't have to worry about automated replies, such as out-of-office messages, falsely flagging that your email has been opened because generally automated replies do not download the tracking graphic.