Open and click tracking

Transactional emails are important messages and it is essential to know whether your recipients have engaged with them. ZeptoMail gives the provision to track two parameters — opens and clicks. These stats can be viewed in the Report section and the Mail analysis graph in the Dashboard.

Open tracking

Open tracking allows you to check if your emails are opened by the recipient. With this metric, you will know if your emails have reached the recipient's inbox. 

How does it work?

Email opens are captured using pixel tracking, where a small 1X1 image (pixel) transparent image is embedded in the header or footer of the email. The image is not visible to the recipient. When the email is opened, the image loads and the open count is transmitted to ZeptoMail. 

Click tracking

Click tracking tells you if a recipient clicks on the links sent with your emails. Click tracking keeps track of the content relevance and the number of customers who have followed through to the next step. 

How does it work?

Click tracking works by adding a tracking parameter to the attached URL. Whenever the URL is accessed, the link count will be registered and displayed to the end-user.

Tracking sub-domain

The URL and pixel used for tracking, are created using a sub-domain. This sub-domain aka tracking sub-domain is embedded within the email. Whenever an email is opened or a link is accessed, ZeptoMail parses the information to show you the open and click count. 

When you enable tracking in ZeptoMail you should add a custom tracking sub-domain. This sub-domain should be verified using CNAME records shown in the UI, to start using it. As a best practice, add the sub-domain of the email-sending domain to avoid ISPs from thinking the sub-domain as a spammer. 

Track recipient activity for your emails

You should enable the email tracking feature to track the number of opens and clicks in your account. To do so:

1. Login to your ZeptoMail account.
2. From the left pane, select the Mail Agent for which tracking needs to be enabled.
3. Navigate to Email Tracking tab. Here you can view Email Tracking Configuration box.
   
4. Use the toggle button to enable tracking (clicks and opens) and the next toggle button to enable tracking.
   
5. Next, choose the preferred default value for SMTP/ API parameter. True will track all emails by default. False will use the tracking parameters configured in the email header.
6. Enter the sub-domain name you want to use to track your clicks and click Save. 
   
7. You should add and verify the CNAME record shown in the UI to your DNS. You can verify this manually or share records with your colleagues.
8. To share records with the colleagues, click the Share records button. Enter the recipient's email address, a suitable description with instructions to verify the domain and click Send.
9. Click on Verify and Save to complete the Email Tracking set up.
   
10. After this step, we will be adding these to our Admin records and you will receive an email from us once tracking is enabled for you. If you want to disable your tracking at any point in time, you can do so in this section.
11. You can also use headers to configure tracking for SMTP/ API. Use boolean values for the headers to enable or disable tracking. If these headers are not specified then the tracking will happen as per the default value selected for SMTP/ API parameter selected in the previous step.
    • ​SMTP header fields: "X-TM-OPEN-TRACK" and "X-TM-CLICK-TRACK"
    • API fields: "track_opens" and "track_clicks"