Without customers, you wouldn’t have a business. However, you need to build customer relationships through communication – especially email. For these emails to be effective, you’ll need to know if recipients are opening them. This is where Salesforce email tracking comes in, giving you all the information you need to nurture valuable relationships.
In this blog post, we’ll look at Salesforce email tracking in more detail.
What Is Email Tracking?
Email tracking shows you who’s opened your emails and clicked on the links in them. More importantly, it shows you who’s not. There are several benefits to knowing this. For instance, it can show your audience’s engagement with your content and Salesforce campaigns.
And, because you can track it over time, you can see what impact any changes you make have on your numbers. In addition, Salesforce email tracking allows you to send follow-ups to those who might not have received your emails. At the same time, you can also remove those people who never read your emails from your email list.
When using email tracking in Salesforce, you’ll typically look at two key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Open rate. The percentage of recipients that open your emails. A low open rate shows that your emails might need to be more engaging for your audience to open. To fix this, you’ll need to tweak your subject lines to generate more interest and increase the chances of a recipient opening the mail. You can also experiment with sending emails at different times. Once you’ve found what works for you and have consistent open rates, you can then extrapolate this figure to future emails, so you can work on the assumption of how many people will open your emails.
- Click-through rate. Click-through rate shows the rate at which recipients click on links in your emails. In other words, it measures how many recipients click on links in an email out of all the emails you send in a specific campaign. Here, you’ve already crossed the barrier of convincing a recipient to read your email, so to fix lagging click-through rates, you’ll need to look at the assets or magnets you use to get your audience to click through.
If you’re a sales manager, you can also evaluate the email-related activities your teams perform with Salesforce email tracking. For example, you can see how often they communicate and follow up with interested prospects and how high touch they are with your key accounts.
Why Should You Track Emails?
Get More Insights with Salesforce Email Tracking
Customers are one of your business’s most valuable assets, and your business depends on solid relationships. Email tracking helps your business grow by giving you deeper insights into how well you build these relationships.
This is because it lets you track the progress of the emails you send. And let’s face it, knowing who’s reading your emails, who’s not, and who clicks on the content in your emails tells you what your customers are interested in. Similarly, you can gauge Salesforce accounts’ interest in your offers, proposals, and general communication.
This means you can focus on building relationships with your customers by sending them content and follow-up emails that align with their needs and expectations. In addition, when you track click-throughs on your emails, you’ll get deeper insights into what types of assets and lead magnets lead to the highest click-through rates. As such, you’ll be able to personalize your strategies to improve your performance and build stronger relationships.
Get Increased Context
We’ve already mentioned that email tracking gives you deeper insights into how you build relationships with your customers. So, it gives you an overview of your customer interactions and engagement. In turn, this gives you more context surrounding your relationship with every customer. You can send the right content and follow up at the right time.
Businesses can succeed or fail based on their ability to connect with the right people at the right time. Because Salesforce email tracking allows you to do this by providing insights and context, it plays a significant role in your business’s success.
Salesforce Email Tracking Improves Your Efficiency
When you use email tracking, you can see if a recipient has opened your emails and if they clicked on any of the links or assets in the email. Now, when someone doesn’t respond to your first email, it can either be a sign of poor lead quality or motivation to follow up with a more enticing offer.
Knowing who’s genuinely interested and who you should follow up with first (especially when you compare this data with your other Salesforce reporting data, including account value and lead potential) will help your team prioritize and save time and effort.
On the other hand, when a recipient opens an email and, even better, clicks on the link in the email, you’ll know they’re interested in your products or business. You can then follow up with the right content at the right time to nurture these interested prospects.
This means your sales team will have a higher chance of moving the prospect through the pipeline and closing the deal. Ultimately, your sales and marketing teams will spend their time much better and perform tasks more efficiently.
Nurture Accountability
Another benefit of email tracking is that it can show you what your prospects do with your emails and what your sales teams are doing. You can use the data provided by email tracking to see exactly which activities your sales teams are performing, when they’re emailing, and gauge how effective they are at email communication.
It goes further than this, though. Email tracking can also help you find emails to document customer conversations for training purposes or if any disputes arise. This makes email tracking a simple and powerful tool to keep your team accountable.
You can always use your email tracking data to coach your team and introduce them to new best practices to increase their success rate.
Improve Productivity
Another major benefit of email tracking is that it can make your sales teams more productive. This is because it can help sales reps track and manage their communications with prospects.
They can also see what parts of their strategy are (not) working, allowing them to make improvements where necessary. You can even use reporting based on email tracking for training purposes and to keep teams motivated. Ultimately, all this makes your sales reps more productive and helps them close more deals.
Your Return on Investment
You’ll take a data-driven approach to email marketing and communications when you use email tracking. This means you’ll understand your audience and accounts’ communication needs and expectations. Instead of shifting goalposts, you’ll know exactly what they prefer, be that constant communication or sporadic, timely updates. In other words, your emails will be more accurate, reach the right people, and you’ll see higher open rates.
Flowing from this, you’ll spend less time and money to reach the right people. So, you’ll have a much higher return on investment.
How to Activate Email Tracking in Salesforce
In the past, you would have had to generate manual reports to see if recipients opened your emails. Fortunately, you’re now able to get this information from the activity timeline.
However, you’ll first need to activate email tracking and Enhanced Email in Salesforce. Fortunately, you can do this quite easily by following these steps:
- You’ll first activate the Lightning Experience if you haven’t already
- You’ll then make sure that Enhanced Email is enabled
- Under Setup, you’ll then click on Activity Settings
- On the page that opens, you’ll select the Enable Email Tracking checkbox
- With the checkbox selected, you can click on Submit
With email tracking enabled, you’ll be able to track emails you send with Gmail, Office 365, Salesforce, and Email Relay. You’ll also see email tracking information in the activity timeline. And with Enhanced Email activated, emails will be saved as EmailMessage records, not Task records, so your tracking will be more accurate.
Start Tracking Emails in Salesforce Now
Now that you know how Salesforce email tracking can help you reach your customers and prospects more effectively, it’s the prime time to act on it!
Managers can use Salesforce email tracking to evaluate success, as well as identify and coach poor performers on the team. On the other hand, sales pros will know exactly when a prospect is dying to hear from them – and when they’re still sitting on the fence.
The more you know, the easier it is to close a deal, so check out Salesforce email tracking and boost your ROI today!
