How to Track Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Since the v6.60 G-Lock EasyMail is fully compatible with the 3 version of our email tracking service G-Lock Analytics. G-Lock Analytics is a cost-effective web service to track email campaigns in real time. You can easily track your email campaigns all over the world and clearly understand who from your customers are most interested in your emails, or what part of them they like more.
In this tutorial I'll tell you how you can easily add tracking links to your email newsletter using G-Lock EasyMail and start tracking your email campaigns right now.
Just follow these simple steps:
- Setup an account on www.glockanalytics.com
- Create or load the message with original links into G-Lock EasyMail. Make sure you have original links in both HTML and plain text parts of your email.
- Add a campaign to your G-Lock Analytics account from G-Lock EasyMail
- Insert an unsubscribe link into your email (optional)
- Click Send
Now let's describe each of the above steps in detail.
Creating User Account
If you don't have an account on G-Lock Analytics yet, create it here.
An email with an account activation link will be sent you via email.
After you activate your account, login, go to "Account" and download a redirect script. We suggest that you upload the redirect script to your website.
Placing a redirect script onto your website will allow you keep your brand in front of your recipients and not confuse them with a generic click tracking link such as http://www.safeclickpro.com/r.php. You don’t want to send subscribers to a third-party website. Links that go to a tracking domain may cause some recipients to not trust you and to not click through. If you upload a redirect script to YOUR website, tracking links will go through your own domain.
Adding Email Campaign from G-Lock EasyMail
Before you add a campaign, you need to connect to your account from G-Lock EasyMail to be able to track the emails and collect email metrics. To connect to your G-Lock Analytics account:
1. Open G-Lock EasyMail v6.6
2. Click Home -> Settings -> G-Lock Analytics
3. Enter your login email and password
4. Click Test and click OK
After you successfully connected to your account on G-Lock Analytics, you can add an email campaign.
To add an email campaign:
1. Create an email message or open a draft or template in the Edit Message window.
2. Click on G-Lock Analytics tab on the Edit Message window.
3. Click on Enable Tracking
4. Click on Add New Campaign
5. Fill in the form
Active – Check this box to enable campaign tracking
Campaign Name – Any name for your campaign (you can enter the subject of your email, for example)
Start Date – The date when G-Lock Analytics starts collecting email metrics for the campaign (by default the current date is inserted)
End Date – The date when G-Lock Analytics stops collecting tracking metrics for the campaign, and the campaign becomes inactive (points are not deducted from your account when the campaign is inactive). Despite this, the links in your message continue working, and the recipients can still follow them. But those opens and clicks will not be counted.
By default the end date is set to one month forward from the current date. It's recommended that you set the end date approximately 2 weeks later than the start date because the peak of user activity usually falls to two first weeks after the email sending date. For example, if your start date is 03/11/2010, you can set the end date to 03/25/2010.
Number of Recipients – Enter the number of recipients in your group.
Number of Bounced – Leave this field empty when adding a campaign. After the emails are sent you can collect bounced emails with the Bounced Manager module in G-Lock EasyMail and report the number of bounces to G-Lock Analytics. The email tracking metrics will be calculated with regard for bounces and you will get more accurate results.
Use Redirect Script – Check this box if you uploaded a redirect script to your website
Redirect Script URL – Type the URL of the redirect script on your website, for example: http://www.yourdomain.com/r.php
6. Click Add to add the campaign.
The campaign will be added to your G-Lock Analytics account and will be shown in the Campaign field.
Tracking Opens: How G-Lock EasyMail Adds Open Tracking Code to Email
Opens are tracked by a small transparent image inserted into the HTML email source. When a recipient opens the email, the image code works and G-Lock Analytics counts an open.
That’s why opens can be tracked for HTML emails only. If the recipient reads the email with images blocked, or on a mobile device in the plain text format, the open is not counted.
If you use G-Lock EasyMail, you don’t need to insert the tracking image code into your email manually. G-Lock EasyMail does this automatically during the email sending.
Tracking Clicks: How G-Lock EasyMail Adds Tracking Links to Email
After you added a campaign, you don’t need to manually replace your regular links with tracking links. Just click Send to send the message. During the sending process, G-Lock EasyMail will add your links to G-Lock Analytics and replace them with tracking links automatically.
Important! During the sending process ALL regular links in your message will be replaced by the tracking links. But there are two cases when links will not be replaced by tracking links:
- If a link includes a merge field, for example, http://twitter.com/glocksoft%%Comment%%
- If a link is already converted into the tracking link.
Trick: As G-Lock EasyMail will replace all links into tracking links except two cases mentioned above, here is a trick how to keep an original link in the email if you don’t want to track it.
Go to the HTML source of the email, find the link, put the mouse at the end of the link, click on the Merge menu and merge a field that is empty for this group in G-Lock EasyMail address book. For example,
http://twitter.com/glocksoft%%Comment%%
Then go to the plain text part of your email and merge the same field at the end of the link in the text part.
Now when the link contains a merge field, it will not be replaced with the tracking link. Since the %%Comment%% field is empty in the address book, nothing will be merged at the end of the link. The link will look like http://twitter.com/glocksoft when the users receive the email.
Adding Unsubscribe Link in G-Lock EasyMail
To collect people who unsubscribed from your mailings, you can insert a tracking unsubscribe link into your email. G-Lock Analytics generates an unsubscribe link for you. To insert the unsubscribe link into your email, do this.
Click on G-Lock Analytics tab on the Edit Message screen.
Click on “Enable Tracking” button and select the campaign.
Highlight the text to which you want to attach the unsubscribe link to, for example, “Click here to unsubscribe”, and click on the “Click to insert Unsubscribe Link”.
If you don’t have any anchor text, just put the mouse at the place where you want to add the unsubscribe link and click on the “Click to insert Unsubscribe Link”. The link will be inserted using “Unsubscribe” as the anchor text.
Now go to the plain text part of your email, put the mouse at the place where the unsubscribe link must be added and click on the “Click to insert Unsubscribe Link”.
The unsubscribe link will be inserted in this format:
http://www.glocksoft.com/r.php?u/18n/%%Encoded_Email_Analytics%%
where %%Encoded_Email_Analytics%% will be replaced by the encrypted recipient's email during the sending process.
Testing Email with Tracking Links
Before sending the email to the whole group, we recommended that you send it to a test group which contains your test email addresses.
Receive the email on your test accounts, open the message and click on the links. Then go to your G-Lock Analytics account and view the statistics to ensure the email opens and clicks are calculated.
A good idea is to create test email accounts on most popular email services like AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and send a test email with tracking links to those accounts. Not only will you be able to check if the email metrics are calculated, you will also be able to see how your message is treated by those services. If your email arrives into the Bulk or Junk Email folder on any of your test accounts, you'll need to make the necessary corrections to deliver it into the Inbox.
Reporting Bounced Emails from G-Lock EasyMail to Email Tracking Service
You can the Bounced Manager module from our newsletter sending program to collect and process bounced emails after your email campaign is complete. After bounced emails are collected, you can report the number of bounced emails from our email sender software to your G-Lock Analytics account. The email metrics will be calculated with regard for bounces and you will get more accurate results.
To report bounced emails to G-Lock Analytics:
- Click on G-Lock Analytics tab in the Bounced Manager
- Click Login to connect to your G-Lock Analytics account
- Select a campaign you want to report bounces for
- Click Report Bounces button
The number of bounced emails will be reported into "Number of Bounced" field on your G-Lock Analytics account. You can open your account, click on Edit button for the campaign and check the number of bounced emails. If the Bounced Manager wasn't able to report the correct number of bounced emails, you can enter the number of bounces yourself.
Managing Opens, Clicks and Unsubscribes in G-Lock EasyMail
In G-Lock EasyMail address book you can copy the email addresses of the recipients who opened the email, clicked on the link or unsubscribed from your mailings to a new group in the address book, or add them to the group exclusion list, or save them to a file.
To do this, use Who Opened, Who Clicked and Who Unsubscribed menus in the address book.
These options make it easy to segment the list based on email tracking results and send the email only to the recipients who didn't open your last message or didn't click any links.
Here you can download a complete user guide How to Send and Track Email Marketing Campaigns Using G-Lock EasyMail and G-Lock Analytics (in PDF format).
Tags: analytics, bulk email software, email blasts, email campaign, email campaigns, Email Marketing, marketing newsletter, mass email, metrics, web service