Q: How can I know if my subscribers view or click on the emails that I send?

By Johannes Hubert
Senior Applications Programmer, L-Soft

When sending out an email message to a group of subscribers, for example a regular newsletter or a campaign introducing new products, you need to know if the recipients actually viewed the message and clicked on any of the links in it. Thankfully, you can use an email marketing solution, such as LISTSERV Maestro, to collect this information automatically and view delivery and tracking reports that are helpful for your work.

What can be measured in email marketing?

In short, almost everything. Email is highly measurable. Here are some examples of what you can do with the solutions that L-Soft offers. You can keep track of all kinds of subscriber activities and create reports on:

• When a recipient opens the email, clicks on one of the links, shares the content on social media or unsubscribes from the list.
• Bounced emails so that you know which subscribers received the email and which didn't (and why not).
• Social media views of your message when subscribers share it with others so that you know how often the shared message is viewed, and on which social media platforms.
• User activity on your website for those who arrive at your website by clicking on any of the tracked links in your messages.

How can I get started?

Getting started is quick and easy since LISTSERV Maestro does most of the work for you automatically.

Usually, you just select the "Full Tracking, All Links" option during tracking definition, and LISTSERV Maestro will automatically track all trackable elements in the mail job, including links. If you want to have more control over which links are tracked and which are not, you can also define the tracked links manually.

What if tracking isn't legal in my jurisdiction?

Different jurisdictions have different restrictions regarding what kind of data you are allowed to track with or without the consent or knowledge of your subscribers. LISTSERV Maestro allows you to adjust the level of tracking so that you can be sure that you aren't breakings any of your local laws.

For this, LISTSERV Maestro has four different tracking types, as described in the following image:

In combination with subscriber lists stored in LISTSERV Maestro, and a special "Tracking Permission" profile field that you can add to such lists, you also have access to the "Permission-Based Personal Tracking" option, which then replaces the standard "Personal Tracking" option:

If necessary, you can also switch off the tracking of subscriber activities altogether.

What can I do with the collected tracking data?

The collected tracking information is useful in many situations, both for classic reports and metrics as well as follow-up activities and identification of trends over time.

The system presents you with the most commonly used metrics such as view rate, click rate, bounce rate and unsubscribe rate, as well as more detailed reports about the trend and development of the user activities over time and the click-rate per link.

Here is one sample of these built-in reports in LISTSERV Maestro:

You can also define your own reports with more complex metrics, for example the number of subscribers who clicked on at least one of three specific links, or the number of recipients who clicked on an occurrence of a certain link at the top of the message, compared with those who clicked on a second occurrence of the same link at the bottom of the message.

With "Personal Tracking" selected, you can see exactly which subscribers performed which activities, and you can use the subscriber profile to analyze differences in behavior among different demographic groups.

Behind the scenes, the personal tracking data is also the basis for several other features of LISTSERV Maestro:

• To view and filter your subscriber data according to how the subscribers behaved in response to already delivered jobs. It allows you to easily find, for example, those subscribers who viewed or ignored a certain job, or those who clicked on a certain link in a previous job.
• To define follow-up jobs, for example to send a job to all recipients who ignored a previous mail job or who clicked on a certain link in a previous mail job.
• To do A/B-split testing. If you do an A/B-split test with two different subject lines, then the viewed rate of the two variant jobs will tell you which one was better – in the sense that its subject line motivated more recipients to open the email. Or if you do an A/B-split test where in each variant the same link appears in two different places, then comparing the click rates of these two links will tell you which placement motivated more recipients to click on the link.
• To download and export the tracking data for any kind of external advanced analysis or usage that you need.

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