It can be disheartening not knowing how many people on your list are opening your emails. Email tracking software can provide valuable insights you can use to hone your internal communications strategy. 

A staggering 306 billion emails are sent and received every day. It’s not uncommon for people on your distribution list to receive tons of emails. But now you’re left wondering what happened after you hit the send button.

Did your recipients receive your internal emails? Did they click on your links? Are your emails even getting delivered or are they being lost in a spam folder? Email tracking software helps you answer these questions and more.

What Is Email Tracking?

Email tracking is the process of gathering email metrics on your sent emails. These metrics can include who is opening your emails, how many links are being clicked, and how long your recipients are reading your emails.

Email tracking is especially valuable for internal communications. By tracking metrics like open rates, you’ll be able to see who is active on your list and identify your most engaging content.

Email tracking combined with employee feedback options provides valuable insight that you can use to refine your internal communication strategy.

How Does Email Tracking Software Work?

Email tracking software works by placing a tiny image pixel in your emails. These tracking pixels can detect when recipients open and interact with your emails. You’re then able to view that data from your internal email analytics dashboard:

For internal communications, you can use an email tracker to see who is engaging with your newsletters and emails on an individual or company level.

Email tracking in Outlook

You can indeed request read receipts in Outlook to confirm that your message was opened. But it doesn’t offer a reliable email tracking system to get clear and consistent Outlook email analytics. Recipients can choose not to send a read receipt, or they can ignore the request.

Here’s a notification that Outlook users receive if the sender requests a read receipt:

Read receipts only work when you send to recipients that also use Outlook. Otherwise, the recipient won’t receive a notification that you’ve requested a read receipt.

For many reasons, this is why it is recommended to use an Outlook email analytics tool like ContactMonkey for your internal email campaign analysis.

Email tracking in Gmail

You’ll face similar challenges in Gmail. While you can request read receipts, recipients can choose not to confirm a receipt when prompted or they can simply ignore the request.

Here’s the prompt that Gmail users receive if you request a read receipt:

Note that you can’t request read receipts with a normal Gmail account. You’ll need G Suite—a suite of software tools from Google.

With email tracking from ContactMonkey, you won’t have to deal with read receipts and wonder whether recipients are opening your emails. Book a free demo to see how easy email tracking in Outlook and Gmail can be with ContactMonkey.

Why You Should Use Email Tracking Software

One of the downsides of company-wide emails is that some employees may receive communications that aren’t relevant to them. This will clog their inboxes when this happens.

If you send irrelevant emails, people on your list will inevitably lose interest. In fact, 33% of email users say they’ve unsubscribed from a list because they received emails that didn’t match their interests.

Do you have offices around the world with employees that speak different languages? Consider creating multi-language internal emails to eliminate communications issues.

Personalize your employee emails

With email tracking software, you can personalize subject lines and even the content in the email. Personalized subject lines for each recipient is easy to do in ContactMonkey—and is one of the best Outlook hacks out there.

Increase employee engagement

When employees have a say in the workplace, their intrinsic motivation increases, and they’re more productive. A report from Salesforce found that employees who feel their voices are heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.

Employees feel valued when you give them an opportunity to voice their opinions and take the time to listen. This increases their engagement and productivity at work.

In-depth Email Analytics for Outlook and Gmail

By using an email analytics tool such as ContactMonkey you can compare and analyze your internal email campaigns easily and quickly. Over time, you can zero in on what messages and topics engage your employees the most in your email analytics dashboard.

What is the Best Email Analytics and Tracking Software?

The email tracking solution for your business will depend on what you intend to use it for. Different email tracking software can perform tasks better than others, so we recommend determining the specific needs of your communication team prior to demoing different solutions.

Here we will break down the most popular email tracking solutions currently available, describe their unique features, and give you an overview of their best potential uses.

1. ContactMonkey

ContactMonkey is an all-in-one internal communications tool that helps businesses boost employee engagement and create better company emails. Using Outlook or Gmail, you can easily create HTML emails and newsletters using a drag-and-drop email template builder, send personalized employee emails, and track a wide range of email analytics like:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Read time
• Opens by device and location
• Open time trends
• Individual link clicks
• Best performing links
• Click maps
• and more…

ContactMonkey can also be used to gather employee feedback using your internal emails. The feedback you receive via pulse surveys, anonymous employee comments, and eNPS are viewable beside your email metrics to give you a complete picture of your email engagement:

Does your organization have internal or external regulations around email privacy? Using ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking, you can gather email metrics while maintaining your employees’ privacy.

Beyond collecting email metrics and employee feedback, ContactMonkey can be used for email metric analysis as well. Using our reporting feature, you can see which parts of your company are most engaged using filters like department, job title, and location.

You can even use ContactMonkey to send SMS messages to your employees’ mobile devices, and gather stats on your SMS reach.

Use the compare campaigns feature to see exactly what content resonated with that part of your organization, so you can better tailor your internal communications for them. You can compare up to 10 email campaigns simultaneously to see which produced the best results:

You can also collect data that can help improve your email design. ContactMonkey’s click maps feature allows you to see which parts of your emails are getting the most attention from your employees:

Ultimately, ContactMonkey is a powerful email tracking solution that lets you take control of every aspect of your internal emails. Optimize your internal email engagement and drive productivity using our data-driven email tracking solution.

Book a free demo to see how ContactMonkey can take your internal communications to the next level.

2. Mailchimp

It’s likely that you’ve heard of Mailchimp already, but it’s worth examining why their email tracking solution is so popular. Mailchimp offers a comprehensive platform for businesses sending emails to potential and existing customers.

Alongside their email builder and automated email cadence features, they offer email tracking to help marketers send more effective sales emails. Their email tracking includes open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and open trends over time. They also offer personalization options for sending emails to customers.

If you’re looking for an email tracking solution to help grow your business via external email marketing, then Mailchimp is a great choice. If you’re looking for a comprehensive approach to internal email tracking and analytics, then it’s easy to see why ContactMonkey is a top Mailchimp alternative for internal communications.

3. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is another major player in the email tracking space. Using their suite of email tracking tools, marketers can gain a better understanding of how their emails are being received.

Similar to Mailchimp, Constant Contact allows users to create and automate marketing emails, while being able to track the performance of these emails and email cadences.

Constant Contact’s email tracking includes features like:

• Engagement reports
• Campaign comparison
• On-the-go tracking
• Click-tracking heat map
• Click segmentation

While these are great and in-depth email tracking features, they’re used for external email marketing rather than internal communications. If you’re looking for a tool that can help track employees and improve how your business communicates with your employees, then it’s best to choose a dedicated internal communications tool like ContactMonkey.

You can read a head-to-head breakdown of these two solutions in our Constant Contact versus ContactMonkey comparison blog.

4. Staffbase

Staffbase acquired Bananatag to offer a more comprehensive approach to internal email tracking. Staffbase is an internal communications platform that aims to improve the quality of your internal emails and newsletters.

They offer a suite of tools including an email builder, intranet, and mobile app. They also offer numerous ways to measure engagement across these different channels.

While their internal communications platform is far-reaching and includes many useful features, ContactMonkey’s internal communications software offers more in-depth analytics about email engagement and metrics.

Some features exclusive to ContactMonkey include:

• Email sending to CSVs
• Personalized subject lines and body copy
• Individual email tracking

That last one is important. Individual email tracking allows you to measure to behaviour of individual employees, rather than looking at engagement as a whole. Paired with segmented reporting, individual email tracking within ContactMonkey let’s you better understand how different employees feel about your internal communications.

For a detailed breakdown of how Staffbase’s email tracking software (formerly Bananatag) against ContactMonkey, check out our detailed comparison of the two platforms.

5. Poppulo

Another internal communications-oriented email tracking solution is Poppulo. Their product is able to create content for various internal communication channels including:

• Email
• Digital signage
• Mobile devices
• Intranet
• Other collaboration tools

Poppulo offers robust email tracking options including open rate, engagement score, segmented email stats, and engagement over time. They also allow you to view engagement across the channels in which you’ve sent communications using Poppulo.

However, Poppulo is limited in certain ways that ContactMonkey isn’t. ContactMonkey’s Outlook email template builder allows you to gather employee feedback using your internal communications, which is important in order to contextualize your email metrics. ContactMonkey also integrates with your existing Outlook or Gmail inbox, making adoption easier without requiring moving your internal communications to a new platform.

You can read a detailed breakdown of ContactMonkey versus Poppulo on our comparison blog.

6. Hubspot

Hubspot is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) platform that offers countless features for creating and managing customers to your business. From the Hubpost platform, you can:

• Send and automate customer emails and responses
• Create mobile-optimized dynamic marketing content
• Track marketing leads and nurtures
• Measure email engagement and customer interaction
• Create CTAs, banner ads, and more

While Hubspot’s tracking and other features help marketers get more customers for their business, it’s not particularly apt for learning how your employees engage with your internal communications. What’s worse, because Hubspot is an external email marketing tool, they’re required to include unsubscribe buttons on every email sent from their platform. This means running the risk of employees removing themselves from email lists and missing important information.

Not only does ContactMonkey offer more detailed email tracking—including individual email tracking—but recipients of ContactMonkey emails are not able to opt out via an unsubscribe button. ContactMonkey’s email tracking also allows internal communicators to gather employee feedback with their emails, something Hubspot does not offer.

For a detailed breakdown of ContactMonkey versus Hubspot, you can check out our comparison blog on the two products.

EmailAnalytics

EmailAnalytics is a email tracking software for companies looking to increase their sales. They boast an easy setup process, where users simply have to log in to their email address on their site, which will automatically populate with a user’s email stats.

Similar to ContactMonkey, EmailAnalytics allows users to create teams and assign user roles to enable team collaboration. EmailAnalytics will also send users a weekly or daily breakdown of their email metrics.

EmailAnalytics promotes their email tracking platform as being able to improve your Sales team’s ability to respond quickly to customers. While their email tracking tool is easy to setup, this also limits how much you’re able to do with it.

Mailtrack

Mailtrack is an email tracking tool for Gmail. Mailtrack integrates with your Gmail inbox to inform users when their emails have been opened or if recipients have clicked on a link in an email.

Mailtrack’s tool for email tracking in Gmail includes mobile integrations for iOS and Android devices. Their tool also enables users to create and manage email lists within Gmail, and send emails to groups of users.

Mailtrack’s email tracking software for Gmail is aimed primarily at companies looking to improve their external sales and marketing campaigns, and lacks many of the features found in internal email tracking tools like ContactMonkey.

MailTag

MailTag is another email tracking software for Gmail. MailTag’s chrome extension enables your Gmail inbox to measure email metrics like open rate and click-through rate.

MailTag also offers sales-enablement tools like reply automation to help your company respond to customers faster. Your email metrics are visualized on a campaign dashboard where you can analyze your emails’ performance. They also offer enhanced email signatures to improve your customer outreach.

Despite being limited to Gmail, MailTag offers a robust platform for companies wanting to improve their sales outreach.

MailTracker

MailTracker is an email tracking tool for Gmail for sales purposes. Like MailTag, MailTracker uses a Chrome extension to add email tracking features into your Gmail inbox.

In addition to tracking email opens, MailTracker has email alert capabilities to inform your sales strategy. You can receive alerts the moment your email has been read or, alternatively, receive an alert if your email has not been opened in 48 hours.

MailTracker is a light but robust email tracking software for Gmail that offers features not found in similar solutions. However it is still primarily for sales enablement, so if you’re looking for internal email tracking solutions you will have to look elsewhere.

Why Use ContactMonkey for Your Internal Email Tracking

If you’re not yet using internal email tracking software in your organization, you’re missing out on opportunities to engage your employees and gather feedback.

But you can’t just use any email platform to send your internal newsletters. Platforms like Mailchimp are built primarily for sending transactional emails. They also are required to include unsubscribe buttons, which can skew your email tracking results.

ContactMonkey is an internal email tracking solution, so you’re not required to include an unsubscribe button. Beyond that, our List Management feature allows you to build and track custom employee email lists:

Combined with our reporting feature, you can use ContactMonkey to measure email engagement across different portions of your company so you can better focus your employee engagement strategies.

Most email platforms also don’t offer Outlook or Gmail integration. This means your internal newsletters are delivered through external servers, which carries security risks.

However, ContactMonkey integrates with your Outlook and Gmail inbox so your emails never go through external servers. You can also design and create email templates using ContactMonkey’s email template builder, and save time on your email content using our OpenAI ChatGPT integration.

Tracking Emails the Smart Way

If you’re looking for email tracking software that lets you collect employee feedback, send to distribution lists, and gather actionable insights from Outlook or Gmail, then we recommend checking out ContactMonkey and our internal communications software buyer’s guide.

Are you ready to learn how to use internal communications software to create and measure engaging internal newsletters? Then get started with a personalized demo today to see why ContactMonkey is the best way to track employee emails.