Introduction

What is Inbox Tracking?

Quite simply, while a lot of agencies and brands aim to land in peoples’ inboxes time and time again and make that next sale, fewer of them than you’d imagine successfully manage to do this consistently. What’s a good deliverability rate, you ask? It absolutely needs to be in the high 90 percentiles - the closer you get to that golden 99%, the better.

It’s definitely not as easy as it sounds. Yet, with inbox performance tracking, that’s exactly what we did to quadruple the average revenue for each campaign Semihandmade sent - click here to read the full case study.

The Importance of Inbox Tracking

Your email marketing program will only be as good as the amount of information you manage to collect. If you make random decisions that aren’t backed by data, your marketing efforts will never reach their full revenue potential. Inbox monitoring lets you know what happens when your email hits your subscriber’s email platform. Gaining info on why it never made it in the inbox in the first place is paramount to a successful email marketing campaign.

As soon as the email is opened, you start to get all sorts of data, such as seeing who interacts with your content the most, then creating cohorts with your findings and being able to target like-minded audiences that much better. You’ll also gain insight into which content works best for varying subscriber groups so you can create highly targeted campaigns. Inbox tracking can even show you how and where your messages are opened.

Basically, if you’re not tracking your email inbox, you’re slacking because it’s the key to answering all your questions.

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Key Benefits of Inbox Tracking

Like any great basketball team out there, if you want to connect with your customer, you need to form a tight bond. If you want to know someone, you’ve got to observe how they react to what you throw at them.

So how exactly does inbox tracking help boost your marketing efforts? Here are a few ways:

01.

Timing Optimization

Knowing when your audience receives your emails helps us send them out at the right time for each cohort or even each individual contact. The last thing we want is for your messages to get swallowed up by all the other items in the recipient’s inbox. As a full-service email marketing agency, one of the ways that we help our clients stand out from the competition is by studying their subscribers' active engagement hours and taking advantage of that.

We always strike while a lead is still hot because there’s no use in playing the long game when someone is actively engaging and showing interest in your content. All that waiting can waste time, so it’s best to attack while the brand is still fresh in their mind.

But instead of sending a chain of messages in vain, we let the numbers speak for themselves and find out if your recipients are opening your emails in the first place. The last thing we want is to spend all of our resources on a lost cause.
02.

Establishing Benchmarks

Don’t you want to know what makes your customers tick? We’re talking market research at the click of a button here. Inbox trackers let us know which headlines work best with your subscribers. And because nothing beats a targeted campaign, we use inbox placement monitoring to learn more about your audience so that we can improve your emails for better impact.
03.

Improving Engagement

It’s important to weed out worthy prospects from not-so-serious ones for more streamlined targeting. We do this by tracking everyone that’s opening your emails and clicking on your links to ensure that you’re mainly targeting contacts that are most likely to respond (and least likely to hit the unsubscribe button).
04.

Content Strategy Refinement

Not all emails are read once. Those that do get opened more than once need to be studied. Why does one email get more attention than another? We use data to find out what worked best in past campaigns and double down on that, removing what never works and any redundancies that may affect future performance.
05.

Streamlining Automated Workflows

A personalized follow-up sequence is essential to the success of your email marketing campaign. While email marketing automation is pre-arranged, it can still align with the behavior or activity gleaned through inbox performance tracking. That way, all follow-ups can be guided by data, nurturing leads in a timely manner. Relevant content is the name of the game here, and every alert we get from inbox monitoring helps us stay on top of it.

Why Performance Tracking is a Worthy Investment

How you communicate and present your business can either be good or bad for your brand identity. Knowing who to approach and how to approach them is key.

If a brand goes against its own grain and tries to be what it’s not, the brand’s perception would tank, resulting in lowered trust from those who are in a position to potentially become customers.

That’s why we track your emails in order to gauge how they’re being perceived and received. This is one of the best ways to increase delivery rates. After all, email marketing is useless unless your audience gets your emails and opens them. The rhythm of your entire campaign will be determined by what we learn while collecting this data.

Metrics and Data Insights

Essential Metrics to Track

Open Rates & Click Rates

Sales are obviously the most important metric of all, but if you truly want to have your segments built out for maximum performance, the engagement metrics we can gather through analyzing open and click rates will greatly surpass any revenue information.

Bounce Rates

Sometimes you get issues with your recipient’s address and the email bounces - these are things we need to be aware of before we work on the next campaign.

Subscriber Metrics

When someone unsubscribes, we want to know about it. This is useful information that we can leverage because when it comes to customers, you can’t just say “good riddance” and leave it at that. So, we use inbox tracking to find out which email prompted that subscriber to turn to the dark side.

Practical Applications of Inbox Tracking

For Marketing Professionals

We’re able to create an experience that’s especially suited to each individual. As data informs every adjustment we make to the elements in your email, well-crafted messages become your value proposition to the recipient.
For Sales Teams

We always ensure that we’re not just harvesting information but also putting it to good use. We’ll make sure that you fully understand what the numbers are saying and everything will make sense so that the required actions and desired outcome will be clear to you. You can actually base your sales strategy on all the facts and figures that come from email tracking. All this data will be provided, in-depth, by our amazing crew of email experts on our monthly (or bi-weekly) check-in calls.

Frequently Asked Questions about Inbox Tracking

How does email tracking work?

Email tracking is simply keeping track of your emails and ensuring they land in your customers’ inboxes.
What are the legal implications of email tracking?

Email tracking is perfectly legal as long as the customer has given explicit consent for their personal data to be processed, and the business as provided clear information about the purposes.
Are there free email tracking tools available?

Hubspot, Mailsuite, and Boomerang are just a few examples of free trackers currently available.
What is the best email tracking software?

It all depends on what your needs are, but we think you can’t go wrong with Hubspot as it’s one of the most reliable ESP (Email Service Providers) on the market.

Inbox Tracking Perfecting the Art
of Email Performance

Introduction

What is Inbox Tracking?

The Importance of Inbox Tracking

Key Benefits of Inbox Tracking

Timing Optimization

Establishing Benchmarks

Improving Engagement

Content Strategy Refinement

Streamlining Automated Workflows

Why Performance Tracking is a Worthy Investment