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Email engagement tracking

Track, act-on, and analyse whether emails are opened, clicked, replied-to

Daniel Sternegard avatar
Written by Daniel Sternegard
Updated over a week ago

Sending emails from Planhat, but delivered through your Gmail/Outlook, is a wonderful way to make valuable use of Planhat's data. With email engagement tracking, you ensure you have the right feedback data to take action and improve your own outreach strategies.

📌 Re-cap of email automation capabilities in Planhat

📈 How to use email engagement tracking in customer communication

⚙️ Technical details and definitions (eg, how do we define click)

1. Email Automation in Planhat

Email automation in Planhat is used across a number of use cases:

  • I need to send an email to all decision makers at West Coast-based companies with products A and B because we just had a big outage

  • I have an automated sequence of training videos delivered via emails to endusers who recently signed up

  • I am trying to get endusers to sign up for our webinar series, and need to experiment with a couple of different outreach and content strategies

  • We just released a product update and the product team wants to share a summary with a particular set of endusers, based on their usage and role

  • I need to drive collection of overdue invoices, so want to email the procurement team at those companies

  • ...

To solve these use cases, you use a combination of tools:

  • To run automated sequences: use Sequence Workflows + email templates to set up email sequences that can be conditionally driven by any relevant data point in Planhat (read more here)

  • To send single emails: click the envelope symbol on an enduser Full-Page Profile, or bring up the email editor with Ctrl+B or Cmd+B, to send an individual email

  • To send bulk emails: in Data Explorer or an End User Page e.g. Data Table, use our filters to identify a group of endusers who you want to email, and then select all + send email to send out either as 1 email with multiple recipients or multiple emails to each individual enduser

2. Email engagement tracking in Planhat

With email engagement tracking, you ensure you can take appropriate follow-up action from an initial email, and analyse the performance of different outreach strategies. Below, we will walk through how to enable engagement tracking and then how to follow-up and analyse.

2.1 Sending emails with link tracking

Use the "Open rate" and "URL clicks" options (shown in the screenshot below) to turn tracking on and off. This can be done both in the email editor when sending something manually, or on the email template level when sending automated emails (eg, via automations or Workflows). "Reply" tracking will always be on.

Generally, use this when emailing directly with a single enduser. If you send an individual email to multiple recipients, we'll only attribute outcomes to the first enduser on the list.

2.2 Following up and analysing performance

Some common use cases for follow-up:

  • Get a list of emails that weren't opened or clicked in a particular send-out (ask your CSM on how to approach this best for your particular use case)

  • Get a personal notification via Email/Slack/Desktop when an email is engaged with

Analyse the click/open/reply rates of different outreach strategies

The simplest way of exploring email engagement analytics is to use the Page template we've built, available in the Pages library! You can access this from the Content Explorer, or when adding a Page to a Section.

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  • Use the Email Engagement model (object)

  • To analyse Click, Open and Reply Rate - use those fields and split by what you want to understand better. For example, a vertical bar chart with Average Click Rate per Email Template

  • Use filters to only show the subset you care about, for example: Average Open Rate split by Email Template when used in a particular Workflow

There are also company and enduser metrics on outcomes, and rates on the Workflow level, which is helpful in Automations and when analysing entire campaigns.

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2.3 Finding cohorts and lists of endusers who did / did not engage

See below how to filter Conversations using the Email Opened/Clicked/Replied properties. This example filters Conversations based on email outcomes, to only include emails that were opened and that were from the Onboarding Workflow Template.

3. Technical summary and definitions

Overview:

  • Naturally, we can only track emails sent from Planhat and we can only react to outcomes if the reply is synced to Planhat too (eg, check if email integration is enabled and/or if you have any email filters active)

Some definitions of the Email Engagement model:

  • Each record on the Email Engagement model is created by an email sent with any tracking enabled

  • The Open/Click/Reply Rates per email can have the following values:

    • 0 = email not opened/clicked/replied-to

    • 100 = email opened/clicked/replied-to

    • null = tracking not enabled (only possible for Open/Click rate as Reply rate is always tracked)

  • A Reply is defined as any reply to the tracked email by an enduser, excluding any internal users. This will be counted even if the recipient forwards it to a colleague who then replies to the email

  • A Link clicked 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 Reply Rate will be set to 100 as soon as any of the links are clicked

  • We only attribute email engagement outcomes to 1 enduser, so if you send an email to multiple recipients then Planhat will pick the first one in the list of recipients. Note that this is true for replies too, so when you email two endusers (Sofia and Jonas), tracking is assigned to Sofia, and Jonas replies, Sofia still "gets" the reply

  • 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 records. Outcomes are attributed only to the relevant individual email, for example:

    • You send Email 1 to an enduser, and then reply with Email 2 in the same thread, and then you get a reply from the enduser

    • Email 2 will get a reply, email 1 won't (assuming the enduser doesn't actually press the reply on the first email)

    • Link clicks and opens can happen on both emails 1 and 2, so it simply depends on what the enduser does

A note on the data quality of email open tracking

As you may know, the data quality of open tracking is questionable given that some email clients pre-open emails for security reasons. This can lead to false positives, where it seems like a user opened 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 is showing an open rate of 0 (i.e. unopened) but a click rate of 100 (i.e. 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.

Be aware of this when you look at statistics and create workflows - generally link and reply tracking are much more reliable metrics.

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