There are many types of emails that are sent from WordPress sites to users. These emails are even more important when they come from your WooCommerce store to customers who purchase products from the store.
Tracking emails in WordPress helps you understand the customer’s interaction with those messages that he receives and improve them to the point that reduces their rates of being ignored and increases the rates of engagement with them. So in today’s article we will talk about how to track emails in WordPress.
The importance of tracking emails
The ability to track emails in WordPress allows you to see who is opening the messages you receive and who is opening the links sent in the message. So you can get an idea of how customers deal with your site’s messages, and improve them to reach the desired result.
A high open rate for your website messages indicates that the message subject is attractive and successful in getting customers to open the message. A high link click rate indicates the quality of the message content that prompts the customer to click on the link to your site.
Tracking emails in WordPress gives you a look at those numbers that, if they decrease, indicate the need to improve the titles and content of those messages, or perhaps there is a problem sending them.
Track emails in WordPress
You can use the paid version of the popular WP Mail SMTP plugin to track emails in WordPress. The SMTP plugin provides an integrated system for managing outgoing emails from your site’s WordPress control panel , which is why we advise you to use it.
The first thing to ensure, of course, before tracking emails in WordPress, is that the messages are sent successfully from your site, and that they arrive in the recipient’s inbox instead of the spam box. To verify this, you can follow our guide on the causes and solutions to the problem of not sending emails in the WooCommerce store .
Now, let us begin the tracking process using the WP Mail SMTP add-on . We install and activate the add-on using the well-known add-on installation methods that we explained in the article: How to install and activate a WordPress add-on .
Then, after activating the add-on, you must adjust its settings to make it work correctly and to be able to track emails in WordPress using it. We explained in a previous article how to set up the WP Mail SMTP add-on, you can check it out.
Track messages using WP Mail SMTP
The WP Mail SMTP plugin does the tracking automatically. You add a very small image with dimensions of only 1 x 1 pixel to any message sent from your site.
This image is invisible due to its small size, but it has an important impact. When the customer opens the message, you send a signal to your site that the message has been opened. This image does not affect the rating of your messages for spam.
As for links, the add-on also automatically replaces the links in your messages with unique and trackable ones, allowing the add-on to know if the customer opens the links, and at the same time does not affect the purpose of the links.
Activate the message tracking feature
As we mentioned previously, you need the paid version of the WP Mail SMTP add-on, known as WP Mail SMTP Pro , in order to benefit from the email tracking feature. After installing, activating, and setting it up, go to the Settings section of WP Mail SMTP, and then to the Email Log tab.
First, you must activate the Enable Log option in order to start keeping a copy of the general information of sent messages (such as the address, recipient email address, sending information, CC and BCC, and message status) in the WordPress database.
After activating this option, you will see several other detailed options. You must also activate all of them so that you can resend the messages if they fail to be sent. These options that will appear are:
- Log Email Content: Enabling this option allows you to keep a copy of the text of sent messages, allowing you to search the content of messages.
- Save Attachments: When this option is also activated, a copy of all attachments, regardless of their type, will be kept in your site’s database.
- Open Email Tracking: By activating this option, the small image will be included in the emails issued by your site in order to track the opening of the messages by the recipients.
- Click Link Tracking: Links will be converted into tracking links automatically when this option is activated.
Log Retention Period: Here you can specify how long to keep any copy of sent messages, whether their content, attachments, or general information, before deleting them. If you are concerned about running out of storage space in your site’s database, you can choose not to retain data for a long time.
The two most important options that must be activated from the above in order to track emails in WordPress are: (Open Email Tracking) and (Click Link Tracking). But activating the rest of the options will allow you to resend messages that had an error in sending, with all their details, with the click of a button.
Don’t forget to click the Save Settings button after you’re done.
View history of sent messages
Now that you’ve set the settings to start tracking emails in WordPress, you’ll of course want to see the history of those messages and the status of each message whether it was opened and the links in it were clicked by the client.
To view the log of sent messages, go to the (Email Log) section in the (WP Mail SMTP) plugin, where you will see a list of all messages sent from your site.
From here you can select all messages, part of them, or just one.
Then you can apply one of two commands to selected messages: Either Resend if the transmission fails or Delete.
The Sites option will also appear if you manage multiple sites from the same WordPress control panel (Multisite) . This facilitates the process of managing messages for all sites by collecting them in one place.
You can also place the mouse button over one of the messages to display the “View Log” button. If you press it, you will be taken to a page where the details of the message appear.
These details are divided into the following sections:
- Email Details:
This section contains data on the date the message was created, the email address of the sender and addressee, and the subject of the message.
- Log Details:
Here you will find the status of the message being sent (Sent or Not Sent), the number of attachments (Attachments) in it, and most importantly of all you will be able to know whether it was opened (Opened) by the client and clicked on the links in it.
You can also click on the (View Email) button to view the text of the message.
- Technical Details:
Here you will see a breakdown of the error (if there is one) that prevented the message from being sent.
- Actions:
This section contains several options that allow you to print the email message and export it as a CSV,
Statistics and charts of customer interaction with messages
You can show how customers interact with messages sent from your site by plotting a graph consisting of the number of times they opened messages and clicked on links for a certain period of time.
Below the graph, you will find a list containing all the messages, the customers’ interaction with them, and their sending status.
Thus, we have reached the end of our article in which we explained how to track emails in WordPress so that you can accurately know how customers and users of your site interact with the messages you send to them.
