When I’m sending email to potential customers, I’d love to know more whether they open it and when as well as clickthroughs. Is there a free/cheap tool that does this? Can I just copy an image link from Mailchimp or Google Analytics or something?
I have Signals by Hubspot for my personal gmail account, and something like that is what I’m looking for. However, I am using Office365 (Would like to switch, but that’s not happening right now) for my business account.
You can use a transactional email service (or SMTP-as-a-service provider) like Mandrill (by Mailchimp), Mailgun, Mailjet, PostmarkApp etc. All of them offer a free tier - some up to 12.000 emails per month.
Basically you then send your emails through their SMTP server, which works for every email client by just adjusting the sending SMTP servers credentials. For web apps you can use their API, which is a bit more involved, but usually offers more options, like tagging etc.
The provider then auto-modifies your messages in a way that your links get rewritten to their redirecting counter and a counter image is inserted. This way you can track clicks, opens, bounces etc. through your providers dashboard.
HTH
Steffen
A less invasive and easier solution would be YesWare, which is a Gmail plugin that will track opens for you on any Gmail account. I use it on simple cold email campaigns where I don’t have double-opt in permission.
Thanks for the suggestions. I just signed up for Banana Tag and will give it a try.
scojo - how did Banana Tag work for you?
Find anything better?
I’m still looking for a solution to this as well.
I tried it, but didn’t really like it. I had to change the email address of the person I was sending to. They’ve maybe changed the product, and they maybe have a plugin to do that now, but that was the blocker for me.
I know a guy from this group is starting bluetick.io which is meant specifically for doing high-touch sales for small folks like us. I think he’s releasing to preview in the next couple of months. Just put that out there.
Thanks for the info!
Will check on bluetick
Good luck to you!
Eric
Quite a few solutions exist. From the top of my head Yesware, Boomerang and mailtrack. Yesware used to have a free tier but I think they have wound that up recently.