Email engagement tracking is an important part of sending emails, whether you are messaging your customers, prospects or other contacts. You'll typically want to know whether an email has been opened, clicked on or replied to, etc.

Within Planhat, the different possibilities can be configured in a granular way. Via permissions, you can control which Users (you and your colleagues) have access to which settings; and then email engagement settings can be configured (separately for opens and link clicks) for both the overall tenant and in individual Email Templates. You can have open tracking and link click tracking on as default, have it off as default but allow people to turn it on, or completely disable it across your tenant.

There are several permissions related to email engagement tracking. As usual with permissions, you (as a Planhat admin) should enable the relevant permissions for the relevant Roles (within the "Settings" Global Tool). If you can't see one of these permissions to turn on for a Role, please speak with your Planhat CSM, as they need to be enabled on a tenant level first.

To configure email engagement tracking settings (defaults for email opens and clicks), and also to configure Email Templates (which also have their own email engagement tracking defaults), a Role needs the "Outbound Emails" workflow permission, as this controls access to the "Outbound Email" part of the "Settings" Global Tool, which we describe in more detail later in this article. This permission should be turned on for any Role for Users who will be editing these settings, e.g. Marketing.

There is a specialized data model for tracking email engagement, called (as you might expect) "EmailEngagement". As this is a model that is "behind the scenes" - e.g. you can refer to it in a filter, but you can't view its records in Data Explorer - you will find it in the "System models" part of the data model permissions. As with other model permissions, you can click on it to view and configure permissions for its properties (fields) too.

Another related set of data model permissions are the "Email Template" permissions, which are also in the "System models" section - in fact immediately after EmailEngagement, as shown in the screenshot below.

While Email Templates aren't specifically an email engagement tracking feature, you can set tracking defaults in Email Templates, so it's worth mentioning them here too.

Here you can ensure that the relevant Roles have access to configure Email Templates.

The main email engagement settings can be found in the "Engagement" part of the "Outbound Email" section of the "Settings" Global Tool.

Click the image to view it enlarged

At the top of the "Engagement" settings, you can see the settings related to email tracking: "Track Opening (tracking pixel)" and "Track Links". (At the bottom of this part of the settings, there are elements related to marketing emails.)

Here you can configure your tenant's settings related to tracking email opening and links being clicked. The options for each are:

What effects do these different options have? Let's go through what the email editor panel looks like with each of these different options selected. (For simplicity, we are using the examples where both "Track Opening" and "Track Links" have the same option selected.)

Note that all the above examples are showing the default when the email editor panel is first opened up. If you then select and apply an Email Template, this can affect the results shown here. Check out the next part of this article for details.

Also within the "Outbound Email" section of Settings is where you set up and manage Email Templates.

For each Email Template, you define what the default tracking setting should be.

So how do these Email Template settings and the tenant-level settings interact, if they are different? Let's go through a few scenarios where you are writing an email and you apply a Email Template. (For simplicity, we are assuming that open tracking and click tracking are either both on or both off, as detailed in the table.)

As you can see, the settings in the Email Template usually takes precedent, unless tracking has been disabled in the tenant, in which case the Email Template can't override that.