How to Track Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Our bulk email software G-Lock EasyMail is compatible with an 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 blasts 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 marketing newsletter using G-Lock EasyMail and start tracking your email blasts right now.
Creating User Account on G-Lock Analytics
Before you can insert tracking links into your mass email, you need to setup a user account on our email tracking service. The email campaign tracking metrics will be stored in your account. You will be able to login and see the reports at any time.
To create a user account:
- Go to G-Lock Analytics
- Click Sign Up
- Fill in the form
- Click Signup button
Your account will be created. A confirmation email with the account activation link will be sent at your email address. Click on the link in the confirmation message to activate your user account on G-Lock Analytics.
Important! G-Lock Analytics works on a point-based algorithm. Every time a recipient opens your email or clicks on a tracking link in your email, one point is deducted from your user account. We have one-time and flexible monthly point payment plans. Read more about our Payment Plans and choose the plan that suits your marketing needs best.
Downloading Redirect Script
After you’re logged in, you will be suggested to download a redirect script and upload it 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 and will look like
http://www.yourdomain.com/r.php
If your website is hosted on a Unix/Linux platform, download a PHP redirect script
If your website is hosted on a Windows platform, download an ASP redirect script
Upload the redirect script to your website. Example: http://www.yourdomain.com/r.php
Adding Email Campaign from G-Lock EasyMail
After your account on G-Lock Analytics is setup and active, you need to establish a connection 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:
- Open G-Lock EasyMail v6
- Click Home -> Settings -> G-Lock Analytics
- Enter your login email and password
- Click OK to save the settings
When the connection with the email tracking service account is made, you can add an email campaign to your account directly from our mass email program.
To add an email campaign from G-Lock EasyMail:
- Create an email message or open a draft or template in the Edit Message window
- Click on G-Lock Analytics tab on the Edit Message window
- Click on Enable Tracking icon
- Click on Add New Campaign icon
- Fill in the form
- Click Add to add the campaign
The campaign will be added to your G-Lock Analytics account and will be selected in the Campaign field.
Adding Tracking Links to Email Message
Note: if you checked Track Opens box when adding a campaign to your account, G-Lock Analytics Tracking service will automatically insert an open tracking image HTML code into your message. The opens will be tracked only for HTML emails.
After you created an email message and added an email campaign, you’re now ready to replace your regular links in your email newsletter with tracking links. To do this, just click on Add Links to Campaign icon.
G-Lock EasyMail will pass through all the links in your HTML email so you will be able to choose yourself which links to track.
To replace a regular link with the tracking link, click Add URL on the displayed form.
To skip the URL and leave it by default, click Skip.
To close the Add Link to Campaign window, click Close.
Embed Recipient Email into Link – check this box to insert the recipient’s email address into the tracking link. The email addresses of the recipients who clicked on the link will be collected under Who Clicked in your G-Lock Analytics account.
Encode Recipient Email – check this box to encode the recipient email address in the tracking link.
Note: You cannot edit the Anchor Text or URL in the Add Link to Campaign window. You can edit the URL either in the email source or click on the Edit menu and then click on Hyperlink.
If you also prepare a text alternative of your email, you can insert the tracking link into the text version too. To do this, click on the Text Part tab at the bottom of the Edit Message screen, edit the text part if necessary, put the mouse at the place where you want to insert a tracking link, click in the Track Link field, select a link and click Insert.
In the text alternative of the message a tracking link will look like a link with the embedded recipient’s email address.
Previewing Email with Tracking Link in Bulk Email Software
After you inserted a tracking link into your email, it’s recommended that you ensure your tracking link is correct and contains the encrypted email address of the recipient. To do this, click on the Group Merge Preview tab at the bottom of the Edit Message window. Then click Refresh button. You will see how the email will be sent to the recipients from the selected group.
You can put the cursor on the tracking link and look at the bottom of the screen. The real link will be shown there.
The link must contain p=….x=1. It means that the link contains the encrypted email address of the recipient.
http://www.fastblogfinder.com/r.php?q=MTg6MjE&p=%%Encoded_Email_Analytics%%&x=1
You can use |<<, <<, <, >, >>, >>| buttons to switch between the recipients in the group and make sure the tracking link and email content are correct for each recipient.
If everything is OK, you can click on the Send button on the Edit Message screen and send your email newsletter to your subscribers.
Tip: Before sending the email to the whole group, it’s 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:
- Open the Bounced Manager module in G-Lock EasyMail
- 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.
Viewing Email Tracking Reports in Bulk Email Software
You can view the email campaign tracking metrics directly in G-Lock EasyMail Address Book. To do this:
- Open G-Lock EasyMail Address Book
- Click on G-Lock Analytics tab
- Click Login to connect to your account on G-Lock Analytics
- Select the campaign
Our email marketing program will connect to your G-Lock Analytics account and show the real time email tracking metrics for the selected campaign in the address book.
You can easily manage the recipients who opened your email or clicked on the link within the email directly from the address book.
You can copy the email addresses of the recipients who opened the email/clicked on the link 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 and Who Clicked 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.
Tags: analytics, bulk email software, email blasts, email campaign, email campaigns, Email Marketing, marketing newsletter, mass email, metrics, web service