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Net-Results

Net-Results is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for small, midsize and large businesses. Primary features include lead management, lead scoring, marketing list management, email builder, social media management, insight...Read more about Net-Results

4.6 (33 reviews)

3 recommendations

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a web-based marketing automation service with millions of users worldwide. The application allows users to share newsletters on various social networks and track customer engagements. The application provides tools to...Read more about Mailchimp

Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365, formerly Office 365, is a suite of office collaboration and productivity applications. The software encompasses modules that enables the use of Microsoft Office suite and cloud-based solutions such as Skype, Exchang...Read more about Microsoft 365

Gmail

Gmail is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses streamline communication across the organization via emails. It enables professionals to sort inbox messages into various categories and place emails into new tabs using a drag...Read more about Gmail

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Google Workspace

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is a cloud-based suite of collaboration and document management tools designed to help businesses manage video meetings, presentations, multi-person video calls and live streaming. Key features ...Read more about Google Workspace

Constant Contact

Constant Contact delivers for small businesses with tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Whether it's driving sales, growing a customer base or engaging an audience, Constant Contact aims to help users build strong con...Read more about Constant Contact

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must-have platform for intelligent marketing automation. Customers from over 170 countries depend on ActiveCampaign’s mix of pre-built automations and integrations (in...Read more about ActiveCampaign

MailerLite

MailerLite is a cloud-based email marketing solution. Key features include campaign reporting, email automation, subscriber list management and result tracking. The solution helps users to design email campaigns in the form o...Read more about MailerLite

Brevo

Brevo is a cloud-based email marketing tool suited for organizations of all sizes. It offers marketing automation, email campaigns, transactional emails and SMS messages functionalities within a suite. Brevo allows users to crea...Read more about Brevo

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a free email and calendar solution designed for both personal, educational and business use. The software allows users to send, receive, and manage emails, plus book and track events and appointments in the ca...Read more about Microsoft Outlook

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is an online Help Desk solution for e-commerce businesses at the small and midsize levels. The platform offers live chat application, ticket management, online self-service portals, and change and license management, all...Read more about LiveAgent

Marketing 360

Marketing 360 is a cloud-based marketing platform suited for entrepreneurs as well as small and midsize businesses. This solution allows organizations to run social media advertising campaigns, conduct search engine optimization (...Read more about Marketing 360

Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail, a secure, business-oriented email service, is made to cater to all your emailing needs. With top-notch collaboration and communication features, Zoho Mail offers much more than your usual inbox. Unique and custom email...Read more about Zoho Mail

Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

At Constant Contact, we deliver for small businesses with powerful tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) is a marketing and sales platform developed to help busines...Read more about Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid is a cloud-based email marketing tool that assists marketers and developers with campaign management and audience engagement. Its key features include A/B testing, mailing list management, predefined templates, ima...Read more about SendGrid

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is a cloud-based email application that can be used on desktops and mobile devices. It offers various tools designed to simplify email search and improve inbox organization. Users can also store images and documents wit...Read more about Yahoo Mail

EngageBay CRM

EngageBay is an integrated marketing, sales, support and CRM solution designed to help small to midsize enterprises acquire, engage and convert website visitors into customers. The cloud-based platform lets businesses use marketin...Read more about EngageBay CRM

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Pardot, a Salesforce company, is designed for organizations that primarily focus on business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing automation. This email marketing system offers automated support for the longer timespan and multi-...Read more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

iContact

iContact is a Web-based email solution that helps small and mid-sized businesses engage with their customers and grow their bottom line. With solutions from email design, list management, campaign management, landing pages, segm...Read more about iContact

Exclaimer

Get the power to create, control, and deploy company email signatures and fire up a new marketing channel with world leading email signature management. Exclaimer are the industry leaders in email signature software, giving you c...Read more about Exclaimer

Buyers Guide

Last Updated: March 16, 2023

Email marketing may not be the hottest trend in marketing these days—other forms of outreach such as content marketing and social media marketing are certainly much more discussed on marketing websites and blogs—but it's still the essential backbone of contemporary business marketing, and possibly the most popular form of marketing today.

As we define it in our email marketing Buyer's Guide, "email marketing software is used to create, launch and track email campaigns to promote a company's marketing message. It uses email as the primary vehicle for 'keeping in touch' with leads. Its goal is to nurture the leads and keep the brand's solution top-of-mind, until the leads are ready to convert into paying customers."

Email tracking software is an important supplement to email marketing software. It provides an additional set of tools allowing you to track the emails you send out and collect analytical information about them, including email open rates, the number of clicks on links and the number of downloads of attachments.

This Buyer's Guide will explain what email tracking software is, explore its key features and help you consider some key questions you should ask yourself—and software vendors you're considering—as you choose the right software for your business.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Email Tracking Software?

Limitations of Email Tracking Software

Common Features of Email Tracking Software

Key Considerations

What Is Email Tracking Software?

Email tracking software serves two related key functions for your email marketing campaigns: It provides you with valuable analytics and helps you to more precisely nurture leads. It does both of these things by tracking email open rates, click-through rates, download rates and conversions, creating a data set that allows you to closely monitor your campaigns and understand which emails are getting the best response from which potential customers.

Once you are better aware of which of your marketing materials are the most effective, you can refocus your efforts on producing more of that type of material, thus optimizing your email marketing campaigns. This helps you improve your overall sales and marketing messaging and optimize customer/lead engagement.

Email tracking software can also alert you to the exact moment a prospect opens, clicks on or downloads that material, so you can follow up at the perfect time. Thus, it helps you generally improve communications with prospects, since you can keep a detailed list of their engagement with your emails and track just how much of your material they've actually read.

Limitations of Email Tracking Software

Email tracking software integrates directly with your email system so it can automatically become a part of all the emails you send. Many systems function by creating a small, invisible image within the email that contains tracking pixels. When those pixels load, that information is sent back to your tracking database, notifying it that the email has been opened.

For systems that function in this way, there are a few potential limitations:

  • Some customers use ad blockers that will automatically block the image from loading.

  • Not all customers have their email images set to load as a default, so the tracking image won't actually load for them unless they allow it to do so.

  • Other computer security systems may block the tracking software entirely.

Common Features of Email Tracking Software

Email open rate tracking

Monitor the success of individual email campaigns by measuring the frequency with which prospects open emails.

Click-through rate tracking

Track the success of individual embedded links in emails by measuring the frequency with which prospects click on them.

Download tracking

Determine the success of individual email attachments by measuring the frequency with which prospects download them.

Conversion tracking

Keep track of how many leads convert into customers through your marketing campaigns and create similar marketing materials for future campaigns.

Alerts

Set up the software to alert you when a prospect engages in a particular activity—opening an email, clicking a link, downloading an attachment etc.—so that you can schedule a follow-up at the best time.

Reporting and analytics

The software provides reports (and in some cases dashboards) that give you all of the tracking information sent to the database, and can also provide custom-designed visual representations of the data.

Email marketing and scheduling

Most email tracking software will either be one component of, or an add-on to, your larger email marketing software platform, which will allow you to schedule emails based in part on the reports and analytics that your tracking has generated.

A-reports-page-in-email-tracking-software-MPZMail

A reports page in MPZMail

Key Considerations

Other factors to take into consideration when picking the best email tracking software for your business include:

  • Integration with other systems. Though most email tracking systems will integrate with all major email providers, this is an essential aspect of the software and something you must clarify with vendors. Additionally, you should ensure your email tracking software integrates with your broader email marketing, sales force automation and/or customer relationship management (CRM) software.

  • Stand-alone software versus email marketing suites. Related to the question of integration, you'll also want to consider whether you want a stand-alone email tracking system or one that is part of a larger email marketing suite. The benefit of a stand-alone system is that it is simpler to implement and cheaper (possibly even free) to use, but as a trade-off you will not have access to tools that will help you optimize the email campaigns you're tracking. An email tracking system that is part of a larger software suite, on the other hand, will be more expensive, and a bit more difficult to implement, but with the benefit of being automatically integrated with marketing campaign tools that put the data and analytics from your tracking to their best possible use.

  • Cloud-based software versus on-premise software. As recently as a few years ago, most business software was hosted on the premises of the business using the software. This means that, along with the software, you would have to purchase dedicated servers from which to run it, which required not only physical space but also the IT resources to implement and maintain those servers. Today, though, the vast majority of software is provided in the cloud, which allows for a much quicker and easier implementation period as well as a decreased need for dedicated IT resources, all of which translates into cheaper start-up costs. There may still be some vendors that provide on-premises software, though, so you'll want to be sure to ask about this while shopping around.