Summary
When you email your End Users (customers/prospects), you'll often want to understand how those emails have been interacted with - whether they have been viewed, clicked on, replied to, and so on
Understanding email engagement means you can identify the appropriate actions to take, whether that's sending a follow-up email or fine-tuning your email subject wording. Email engagement data can even be used in Workflows to automatically activate/deactivate steps (emails)
Planhat includes a range of specialized functionality for email engagement, including the EmailEngagement model for analysis (filters and charts), and notifications you can enable to be kept informed about email events
Who is this article for?
Everyone!
Specifically, anyone who would like an introduction to email engagement tracking (email analytics) functionality in Planhat
Series
An overview of email engagement tracking ⬅️ You are here
Article contents
Introduction
Email is a key way you communicate with your customers, prospects, and other contacts. It's typically how you discuss technical product details, events, and sales information (e.g. promotions or contracts) - whether that's a one-to-one discussion between you and an individual, or an announcement sent out in bulk to a large group of people, etc.
Planhat has a wide range of email-related functionality, and you can send emails in different ways in Planhat:
It's easy to sync your personal email account with Planhat (whether Gmail or Outlook), for sending and receiving emails
Email Automation Provider functionality via SendGrid is also available for your larger-scale emails, with additional specialist "marketing email" functionality giving unsubscribe options
Planhat Workflows (specifically Sequences) enable you to automatically send out a series of emails in response to changing data in Planhat - they are so sophisticated that they can even revise which emails are sent and when, while the Workflow is running, in response to changing data
Regardless of how you are sending emails, you'll likely want to be able to track and analyze whether/how the recipients have interacted with them. For example:
Has the email been opened?
Has the recipient clicked a link in the email?
Has the email been replied to?
And so on
This information is super valuable, as it helps you to understand the situation and respond appropriately, whether that's a manual response (e.g. you send a follow-up email to a customer) or an automated response (e.g. a Sequence Workflow adjusts in response to email engagement data).
In this article, we'll give you a quick overview of this functionality in Planhat, and link to other articles that dive deeper into specific details.
Why use email engagement tracking?
Email engagement tracking/analytics enables you to understand how your End Users (customers/prospects) are interacting with the emails you've sent, which can be beneficial in various ways. For example:
From the perspective of an individual email (sent to one person), it can be useful for you to know whether that email has been seen or not, as that helps explain why you might not have got a reply, and whether you should send a chasing follow-up email
If you're automatically sending a series of emails via Sequences (Workflows), you can use email tracking to feed into the Workflow as conditions, modifying which emails are sent - so for instance, ending the Workflow (stopping subsequent emails) when an email is replied to (which you can read more about here)
If you're using Workflow Templates (as above) and/or Email Templates (i.e. sending the same email to multiple people), email engagement tracking can help you assess their relative performance, guiding you if you need to make adjustments to these or subsequent Templates
📌 Important to note
If you send a "marketing email" (a specific type of bulk manual email), its engagement is tracked and analyzed via the Sendout model, which you can read about here - we won't go into this topic within this article.
What is email engagement tracking in Planhat?
Let's take a look at what we mean specifically when we refer to email engagement tracking in Planhat.
Sending an email with tracking
When you send emails via Planhat, replies are tracked automatically, and you can optionally enable tracking of email opens and/or link clicks.
In the email creation/editor panel (also called the "email dialog"), under the "Engagement" dropdown menu at the bottom, you'll find checkboxes for "Open rates" and "URL clicks". You can use these to enable/disable these elements of tracking.
🚀 Tip
You can open the email creation/editor panel via the keyboard shortcut "c", by selecting End Users in a table and clicking "Send Email", or by selecting "Send Email" on an End User Full-Page Profile.
🚀 Tip
You configure in your tenant settings what the default tracking for a new email should be.
Then, if you select/apply an Email Template, the Email Template itself will have its own defaults for email engagement tracking.
You can read more about this here.
📌 Important to note
If you enable the "Marketing email" toggle switch (shown in the top left of the screenshot above), the email becomes a "marketing email", which is tracked via the Sendout model. You can read our series of articles on marketing emails and Sendout starting here.
Viewing email tracking data in Planhat
When you view an email in Planhat (as a Conversation Preview), you can see at a glance whether that email was successfully delivered/clicked.
You also have lots of options to analyze engagement tracking in Planhat - from Inbox Pages filtered on tracking properties (e.g. emails with links clicked v. not clicked, emails replied to v. not replied to, and so on), to Dashboard Pages with charts and in-depth analytics.
To read all about visualizing and analyzing email engagement tracking data in Planhat, check out our separate article here.
EmailEngagement model
There is a specialized Planhat data model for email engagement tracking: EmailEngagement.
Each EmailEngagement record is created by an email sent with any tracking enabled.
EmailEngagement has various properties, such as: Click Rate, Open Rate, Reply Rate, Link Clicked, Email Opened, Email Replied, Email Template, Workflow Template, and more.
You can reference the EmailEngagement model when building filters (e.g. to apply to emails in Inbox Pages) and chart widgets (e.g. KPIs in Dashboard Pages). To learn more about this topic, you can refer to this separate article.
Notifications about email engagement
As well as viewing/analyzing data in Planhat via the EmailEngagement model, you can easily enable related notifications too, keeping you up to date with key email engagement events. You can read all about this here.
Further reading and next steps
This article has given you a brief summary of email engagement tracking in Planhat. We have a series of articles containing further details, if you would like to learn more: