Summary
You can set up personal notifications (i.e. notifications for you as a Planhat User) - this is a simple way to customize Planhat to suit you, and enables you to quickly take action in response to data
You enable notifications in your User Profile - click "Add notification" and select your choices from the Notifications Library
There is a category of email-related notifications to choose from, including notifications about emails being opened and links being clicked
These notifications keep you updated about the emails you have sent, whether that was an email to an individual recipient or a group
Who is this article for?
All Planhat Users
It's particularly relevant to you if you send emails to customers/prospects and would like to be automatically informed about email engagement
Series
Email engagement tracking notifications ⬅️ You are here
Article contents
Introduction
When you're emailing End Users (customers or prospects), whether manually to an individual, automatically via a Sequence Workflow, or in a bulk marketing email, you'll typically want to track engagement. Depending on the email, you may be tracking whether those emails have been seen, whether URL links in them have been clicked, whether an email bounced or whether a recipient unsubscribed. This data helps you understand the effectiveness of your emails to help you optimize them for maximum engagement, as well as simply helping you understand the situation (e.g. perhaps you haven't received a reply from an End User because the email you sent to them bounced or hasn't been seen yet).
📚 Further reading
For an introduction to email engagement tracking in Planhat, check out our overview article here.
To read about marketing emails (with unsubscribe functionality and tracking via Sendouts), you can refer to our separate series of articles starting here.
To learn specifically about email engagement notifications, read on.
In upgraded Planhat (ws.planhat.com), it's really easy to choose what you (as an individual Planhat User) would like to receive notifications about, via a Notifications Library accessed via your User Profile. You can also specify how you would like to receive your notifications (in addition to within Planhat via the "Notifications" Home feature) - via Slack, email or desktop notifications.
In this article, we show you how to set up personal notifications related to emails, helping minimize any delay in you finding out about key email-related events, so you can react quickly if required.
📌 Important to note
Be aware that it's not always possible for email engagement tracking to be 100% accurate - e.g. there can be false positives for opens if a recipient's email client pre-open emails for security reasons, and there can be false negatives for opens if a recipient's email client doesn't download images (including the pixel used for tracking).
What are email engagement tracking notifications?
Notifications are how you receive alerts to inform you about something happening. Here we are referring to personal notifications that are configured individually for each Planhat User - they are just one of the many ways that you can customize Planhat specifically for you.
You can view your notifications (as in, the alerts you have received) in Planhat within the "Notifications" Home feature, as shown in the screenshot below. You can see some examples of email-related notifications in this screenshot.
You can also choose to receive notifications via email and/or Slack, and/or as desktop notifications.
Here's an example of what email notifications (meaning notifications received by email) can look like:
Here's what Slack notifications can look like:
Click the image to view it enlarged
In this article, we are focusing on the notifications you can enable that relate specifically to emails you've sent, such as whether an email has been opened.
Why use email engagement tracking notifications?
You'll likely be sending lots of emails to your End Users (customer or prospects etc.), whether that's manually (either to an individual End User, or in bulk as a marketing email) or automatically (as part of a Sequence Workflow).
Email engagement tracking is an important element of this, so you can understand the current situation with each End User (e.g. whether they have seen the information or request you sent), as well as doing larger-scale analysis (e.g. whether one particular marketing email or Email Template led to more replies or more unsubscribes etc. compared to another marketing email - so you can optimize your email communication to improve future engagement).
While there are various ways you can view and analyze email engagement tracking data in general in Planhat (e.g. via the Sendout model for marketing emails, or via the EmailEngagement model for email engagement tracking in general), you can also set up notification rules so you're alerted when emails you have sent are opened/clicked etc., keeping you informed so you can react quickly (e.g. if an email you sent bounced or led to lots of unsubscribes).
How to set up email engagement tracking notifications
In upgraded Planhat (ws.planhat.com), you set your notification preferences within your User Profile, which you can access by clicking on your name in the top right of your Planhat tenant.
Within your User Profile, click on the "Notifications" tab, as shown below. Here you can configure all your personal notification preferences - from how you would like to receive your notifications (desktop and/or email and/or Slack, in addition to the "Notifications" Home feature within Planhat), to what you would like to be notified about (configured via the "Notification rules" section at the bottom).
Within the Notifications tab of your User Profile, there is a section to display any email-related notification rules (as shown at the bottom of the example screenshot below). If you'd like to apply an email-related notification that you don't currently have activated, click on "+ Add notification" (shown at the top of the screenshot below).
Clicking "+ Add notification" opens up the Notifications Library. Click on the "Emails" tab on the left to display all the possible email-related notification rules for you to choose from.
Click the image to view it enlarged
As you can see, you can select from email engagement notifications such as "email opened", "email link clicked" and "email bounced".
To activate any of these notification rules, simply click on its box in the Notifications Library, and then click "Add notification" to confirm.
