How to track emails sent through Affinity
Emailing tracking is now available for individual/bulk emails you send through the Affinity CRM. Turning on email tracking will allow you/your team to track open, click, and response rates.
Note: Email tracking will not be available for our customers who have implemented stricter privacy measures such as disabling sending emails through Affinity or disabling email body syncing into Affinity.
Overview
- How to track emails sent through Affinity
- How quickly will data for Tracked Emails get updated?
- Does Affinity support email sequencing or automated follow-up emails?
- Why do some hyperlinks from my emails sent via Affinity lead to an empty webpage with the Affinity logo?
- Important Callouts
How to track emails sent through Affinity
- To get started, click into the relevant Affinity list to send bulk emails to multiple people at once or go to a person's profile page to send an individual email.
- As you draft up your email in Affinity, you'll notice a toggle on the bottom-right corner. Turn on the Track email toggle.
- Once you have sent out your tracked email, you'll get a modal that explains you'll be notified when the emails are sent out, as well as a hyperlink on the word "here" that directs you to your Tracked Emails page.
- Otherwise, you can click on your Personal Avatar, then click on Tracked Emails.
- Once you get to your Tracked Emails page, you'll get a high-level understanding of how your emails have performed in terms of open, click, and response rates. You will not see your team's sent emails here.
- You can click into each row to access the Tracked Email Details page for each recipient's open, click, and response rates for that specific email.
- You can also visit the recipients' profile pages and scroll down to their Activity Timeline, where you'll notice your tracked emails now include the counts of opens and clicks on links.
- Hover over them to view when the emails were opened or had links clicked on.
- If there is a dash "-" next to Clicks, then that means there were no links found in the email.
How quickly will data for Tracked Emails get updated?
Individual emails
- Sent and processed immediately.
- Appear on a profile's Activity Timeline upon refresh.
- Appear on both the Tracked Emails page and Tracked Email Details page upon refresh.
Bulk emails
- Sent over several minutes depending on how many recipients were selected. At the highest end (200 recipients), processing could take up to 10 minutes.
- The Tracked Emails page should show a row for the batch of emails almost immediately, but the Emails Sent number will reflect how many have actually gone out at that moment in time.
- Once all the emails are sent, the user will receive an email stating that their emails were "successfully sent" and now, the Emails Sent number should match the total number of recipients for that bulk email.
Tracking Open/Click Rates
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Once your sent emails are processed in the Activity Timeline, Tracked Emails page, and Tracked Email Details page, open/click rates should appear almost immediately after the recipient(s) opens an email or clicks any links within the email. Any opens or clicks that occurred beforehand will also be included.
Tracking Replies
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Unlike tracking open/click rates, tracking replies takes longer to process, with a slight time gap between when the user receives a reply and when the reply shows up in the Activity Timeline, Tracked Emails page, and Tracked Email Details page. This should take 15 minutes at most.
Does Affinity support email sequencing or automated follow-up emails?
- Affinity does not support email sequencing or automated follow-up emails based on whether or not recipients have opened your emails.
Why do some hyperlinks from my emails sent via Affinity lead to an empty webpage with the Affinity logo?
- If you sent an email with hyperlinks via Affinity and set up email tracking, then click into the email in your Sent folder and copy/paste these hyperlinks into another email, then you will see that clicking on these new hyperlinks will lead to an empty webpage with the Affinity logo.
- These hyperlinks have been transformed to help with the email tracking and won’t work properly when pasted into another email and sent out again.
- Solution: Please copy and paste the original links from the webpages themselves, not from the hyperlinks sent via Affinity. You can also set up email templates in Affinity if any of these emails are repetitive.
Important Callouts
- The Tracked Emails page will only show emails that you sent out (see Step 5 above), not emails that your team members sent out. However, you and your team will be able to see each other's tracked email analytics on a contact's profile page by scrolling down to their Activity Timeline (see Step 7 above).
- If you have more than one recipient in the To field or added additional recipients on the CC or BCC fields, you will not know which recipient opened or clicked links within the email.
- Similarly, if you go to your Sent folder and open the email/click on links yourself, these will be counted towards the open and click rates.
- Data on open rates can be impacted by a number of external factors:
- False positives: Email tracking has recently gotten a lot of pushback from consumer privacy advocates. Apple specifically is attempting to make email open data irrelevant by triggering pixels to fire regardless of whether email have been opened. There is a chance Google may follow suit.
- False negatives: Many enterprises have technology in place to block pixels from firing, even if the email has been opened.
- Data on link clicks is far more accurate, but too many links in one email could flag the email as spam.
- Users cannot track emails that are sent only to their team members (internals). At least one person outside of their team (an external) must be included on the email. This aligns with Affinity's existing functionality of not surfacing communications that only involve team members (see Internal vs. External Contacts).