How to track transactional emails

You have sent your transactional emails and you know that there is a good chance of them being delivered to your clients, so, what could go wrong, right? Well, kudos to the unshakable faith in the email delivery service but it is always better to be completely sure when it comes to business. This is why it is vital to track the emails you send. Tracking gives you information about how many of your emails have been opened and engaged with. This in turn helps you improve your email performance. You can easily track your emails using ZeptoMail's email tracking option in your Mail Agent.

Why do I need to track my emails?

Despite receiving a good deal of emails on a daily basis, your customers will actively be looking out for certain emails i.e the transactional emails you send. Using this to your advantage will greatly impact your business. Here are some reasons why tracking might help you

Email deliverability :

The obvious reason is to know how many of your emails have reached your recipients. Even though transactional emails are triggered by the customer's action, sometimes the emails may bounce due to certain reasons, and assessing and rectifying the issues will help keep your sender reputation intact. Also, by tracking your click and open rates, you will know how your emails have performed.

Improve your services :

You might be sending different types of transactional emails (like OTPs, welcome emails, etc) for various customer actions. Comparing the engagement rates between them will help improve your services in areas that have a dull performance by making the necessary changes.

In ZeptoMail, the custom reports section is designed specifically for this purpose, where you can compare the click, open and bounces of the different transactional emails that you send.

Tackling bounces :

One of the important aspects of your sender reputation and in turn the email deliverability lies in how you tackle your bounces. Some bounces may happen due to permanent reasons like an invalid email address or a non-existent address. So handling them right away will help you keep your sender reputation clean. You can also limit your bounces by using double opt-in and by giving your clients the option to edit their email addresses i.e., by texting them and asking them to update their email addresses.

Transactional email tracking setup

In order to track your emails, you will have to enable tracking in the Email tracking section. Tracking should be enabled separately for each Mail agent.

To set up tracking in your ZeptoMail account

1. From the left panel, select the Mail Agent for which tracking needs to be enabled.
2. Select the Email Tracking tab. Here you can view the Email Tracking Configuration box.
3. Use the toggle button to enable tracking and the next toggle button to enable SMTP tracking.
   
4. Next, choose the default value that you would like to assign for the API/SMTP parameter.
   • If you choose true, the emails will be tracked, by default.
   • If you have set your default value as false, but have enabled the tracking option, you can still track your emails, by adding Boolean values (True or false) next to the header fields specified below :
     SMTP header fields: "X-TM-OPEN-TRACK" and "X-TM-CLICK-TRACK"
     ​API fields: "track_opens" and "track_clicks.
5. ​​​Enter the domain that you want to use to track your emails and click save. Copy the CNAME value to your DNS record and click verify and save. ​​
6. Following this step, we will be adding this data to our Admin records and you will receive an email intimation once tracking has been enabled for your account.
7. You can disable tracking at any point from this section.