When you send emails to your End Users (customers/prospects), you'll typically want to track and analyze the engagement - were the emails opened, clicked on, replied to, etc.?

Knowledge is power, and with this data you can better understand the situation, and act accordingly in response - whether that's on a small scale (such as knowing whether a particular End User has seen your email) or on a large scale (analyzing the performance of Email Templates sent to large audiences, so you can adjust the wording/design to improve future engagement).

In Planhat, replies are tracked automatically, and you can choose whether to enable open/seen tracking and link click tracking on a per-tenant, per-Template or per-email basis (which you can read about in further detail here). As you might expect, this email tracking applies specifically to emails sent from Planhat and replies synced into Planhat.

Much of the email engagement tracking operates via the EmailEngagement model - a "system model" (internal model) that you won't see in Data Explorer etc., but is perfect for referring to in filters and charts.

While in our main overview article we introduced the topic of email engagement tracking, and we have a range of other articles on specific sub-topics (e.g. see here for permissions and settings related to email engagement, and see here for how to visualize and analyze email engagement using the EmailEngagement model), in this article we are going to cover some technical details of the EmailEngagement model and its fields, and how the email engagement tracking works. This information can be helpful to answer questions you may have, and help you with any troubleshooting.

EmailEngagement has the following fields:

You can see examples of where these properties can be used (in filters etc.) here.

The "Open Rate", "Click Rate" and "Reply Rate" per email can have the following values:

A "reply" for tracking purposes is defined as any reply to the tracked email by an End User (external recipient, e.g. your customers), excluding any Users (i.e. internal recipients - you and your colleagues).

This reply will be counted even if the recipient forwards it to a colleague (another End User) who then replies to the email.

A "link clicked" for tracking purposes is defined as any link clicked in the email. So if you have multiple links in one email, then we'll track all of them, and Click Rate will be set to 100 as soon as any of the links are clicked.

We only attribute email engagement outcomes to 1 End User. If you send an email to multiple recipients, then Planhat will use the first one in the list. Note that this includes reply tracking, so if you emailed two End Users at once - Sofia and Jonas - and tracking corresponds to Sofia, but Jonas replies, the reply will also be assigned to Sofia.

If you send a first email with tracking enabled, and then send another email in the same thread with tracking enabled, you've created two EmailEngagement records. Outcomes are attributed only to the relevant individual email.

For example, let's say you send email 1 to an End User, and then you send email 2 in the same thread, and then you get a reply from the End User:

Please be aware that it's not possible to guarantee that all email engagement data is 100% accurate - particularly when it comes to tracking email opens, as detailed below. Be aware of this when you analyze your email engagement data and build processes based on these statistics - generally link click and reply tracking are much more reliable metrics than opens.

Some email clients pre-open emails for security reasons, which can lead to false positives, where it seems like an email recipient opened/saw an email but actually didn't.

Similarly, you may sometimes get false negatives with open rates. This is because the act of opening the email is actually tracked via a pixel image in the email. If the recipient does not download images in emails by default in their email client, we will not (cannot) track the open. If you encounter a situation where an email tracked in Planhat is showing as unopened but clicked, then that'll likely be a case where the tracking pixel wasn't downloaded/activated despite the email being opened and a link being clicked.