How to Set up WordPress Email Tracking

December 30. 2021

Are you looking for ways to set up WordPress email tracking on your website? Are you curious whether your users receive, click, and open your email? Search no more as we’ve got a simple solution for you. The only thing easier would be to hire experienced professionals to manage your WordPress website to do it for you.

Why should you set up WordPress email tracking?

Even though it might not seem that way at first, this is one of the most important site metrics to track. By knowing how many people open and click your emails, you’ll gain valuable insights that can even help you shape your future marketing strategy.

As you will also get thorough reports about email deliverability, you’ll always be sure that important emails you sent actually reached subscribers and new users. You can even resend undelivered emails and therefore improve your users’ overall experience.

There are many more reasons why tracking your WordPress emails is important:

• Follow which links in your emails are clicked
• Ensure important emails are sent and delivered to users
• Keep track of emails sent by a specific plugin and ensure they’re delivered
• Make sure that order confirmation emails from your online store reach your customers

Regardless of what your website is about, WordPress will send many notification emails to your users. For instance, password reset emails or notifying subscribers about new posts. It’s important to make sure these emails don’t end up in your customers’ spam folders.

Ways to setup WordPress email tracking

Now that you know how important tracking WordPress emails is, we’re going to explain how to set it up. Have in mind that the solution we’re about to present is meant for emails sent only from your WordPress website. For instance, password reset emails or order confirmations. If you want to manage your marketing emails, there are other tools that can help you with it.

One of the easiest and best ways to set up WordPress email tracking is to use the WP Mail SMTP plugin. The fact that it’s already being used by over 2 million websites all over the world means it’s probably worth having this tool on your website, too. This plugin allows you to send all of your WordPress emails in a simple way. It uses an SMTP server and thus improves email deliverability from your WordPress website.

Set up WP Mail SMTP plugin

After you’ve installed and activated the WP Mail SMTP plugin, scroll down to the ‘Mailer’ section. Here’s where you can choose how you want to send your WordPress emails.

The best part about this plugin is that it works great with any SMTP service. You can find setup options for the most popular providers such as Google or Outlook and you can choose which mailer you want to use. By clicking on a specific mailer, you’ll get detailed instructions on how to properly set it up.

The default option is using PHP mailer but as it’s not reliable we don’t recommend using this method. Why? Because most WordPress hosting services are not properly configured and set up to send emails. If you go this way, there is a big chance your emails won’t even reach your users.

Enabling WordPress email tracking

The next step after setting up the WP Mail SMTP plugin is to turn on email logging and tracking features. To find this setting, go to the WP Mail SMTP plugin and click on settings. Next, choose ‘Email Log’ from menu options and make sure that the box next to ‘Enable Log’ is checked. This will ensure you get a record of basic details regarding your WordPress emails. Also, if you don’t enable this feature, you won’t be able to resend WordPress emails.

On the same page, you’ll notice a few more checkboxes. You can use them to turn on the additional email tracking option. In our opinion, the best way to go is to check every option. After all, the more email tracking data you get, the more you can use it to improve your website. You can choose the following options:

• If you check the ‘Log Email Content’ box, you’ll be able to search the content of emails as well as resend emails.
• By checking the ‘Save Attachments’ box, you’ll be able to save copies of attachments you send from your website. This is especially helpful if you need to resend something.
• ‘Open Email Tracking’ and ‘Click Link Tracking’ boxes are very useful. They’ll allow you to track whether a user opened your email and if they clicked on any links and which ones.

After you choose which tracking data you want to receive, it’s time to select the time period for how long you want to save it. In case you worry about your disk space, simply click on ‘Log Retention Period’ and select the time period from a drop-down menu. Don’t forget to click on ‘Save Settings’, otherwise, you’ll have to do it all over again.

How to check email tracking analytics data?

The main reason for installing this plugin is to get important data about your WordPress emails. In order to access it, simply go to the WP Mail SMTP plugin and choose Email Log in your WordPress admin panel. On this page, you’ll be able to see basic email data that will give you a small overview of your users’ engagement such as opens and clicks.

To see more details, you need to open individual email logs. You’ll be able to see information about when the email was sent, was opened, and many more.

In case you want to view your full email tracking and reporting data, simply go to the WP Mail SMTP plugin and click on ‘Email Reports’. This will show you detailed information and statistics about the percentage of your WordPress emails that have been opened and their deliverability.

You will also be able to see a breakdown of how individual emails are performing on the main graph. You’ll find details about open rates, deliverability breakdown, click-through rates, and so much more.

The bottom line

We hope we were able to help you set up WordPress email tracking. Tracking your WordPress emails will give you valuable information you can further use to better your website and improve user experience.