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Statistics regarding your mailings can be compiled in two different ways: The open rate of your newsletters can be tracked with the help of images, tracking solutions can collect data about clicked links in your content.
Tracking open rates means tracking how often your mailing has been opened by recipients. To count how often an email has been opened you will have to include an image in your email which is used only in said email and in no other content. By monitoring the access rates your webserver provides you can assess how often your email has been read.
This kind of tracking is not really exact for a variety of reasons. Not all users load images in emails – in fact many users have configured their email software not to load images automatically. In the case of many big online email hosters, images are always cached; an image appearing in many different emails will be loaded from the original server once and used again and again when displaying the emails.
For these reasons, tracking open rates will always produce inaccurate results. Most times link tracking is the better solution.
Link tracking, i.e. measuring how often a link in your mailing has been clicked, is a mighty tool. However, a link tracking solution (such as Google Analytics or Piwik) needs to be installed on your website.
The tracking software presents different analysis options and enables you to track conversions or goals, i.e. how many customers used the link to your special offer and how many of those who clicked the link actually bought the product.
To differentiate between the links in your mailing, a tracking code has to be added to each link. Depending on the tracking software you use, different codes are provided.
SmartSerialMail will help you implement both kinds of tracking.
To track open rates you need an image which is stored on your webserver and accessible via internet. If you already have uploaded such images to your website, you can insert them in your email content.
If not you can simply use images from your computer in the content and upload them to your server via SmartSerialMail. The direct upload feature is not only useful to generate statistics about image access, it also helps you keep your emails small. Images stored on your webserver or on the internet in general will not be sent with your emails but loaded only on the recipient’s machine.
To implement link tracking you will have to add link tracking codes to your email content. SmartSerialMail offers a comfortable overview over all links used in your email and helps you entering the required information for each link.
Activate the option ”Link Tracking” to have SmartSerialMail help you with the creation of your tracking links. Select the tracking type you want to use. Depending on the tracking solution you use on your website different tracking parameters will be required.