How to Track Email Opens in Infusionsoft’s Campaign Builder

While Infusionsoft gives great reporting on broadcast emails, and individual emails sent out, it can be difficult to get open rates from the Campaign Builder. In fact, traditionally the only way to track email opens in an auto-responder sequence is to pull a pivot table from the email reports.

At least until now — with a great trick from Mike Doughty — that allows you to tag each contact who opens your email so that you can analyze the effeciveness of your auto-reponder sequences, and even run a secondary sequence for those that opened your email (or those who didn’t). Finally the power of broadcast segmentation for all your automated funnels.

Mike has put up a quick walk-through video of how to set up the links — or you can follow along with the instructions below.

There are three main steps that you’ll need to do to set up the email tracking:

1. Create an Automation Link to tag people with the appropriate tag
2. Create an Open-Tracking pixel for your emails
3. Insert that pixel into each of your emails that you want to track

So let’s get started!

Create Your Automation Link

The Automation link is the magic sauce that lets you attach a tag to anyone who visits that link.

1. Go to Marketing > Settings > Automation Links > Automation Link
2. Click on “Create Link”
3. Name Your Automation Link following your existing tagging strategy: (SEQUENCE_NAME-Email-#-Click)
4. Ignore any other fields on this page
5. Copy your link name and save it for later (we’ll use that soon)
6. Click SAVE
7. After you save, the ACTIONS tab will appear. Click the ACTIONS tab
8. Select “Apply / Remove Tag” from the Actions list
9. Click “Create New Tag” underneath the available tags (Unless you will be using an existing tag)
10. Create a new tag with the same name as the Automation Link that you created in step 3 (SEQUENCE_NAME-Email-#-Click)
11. Select your Prospect Category
12. Click “Create Tag”
13. Click Save on the Actions Menu
14. Click Save on the Automation Link page

Create your Open-Tracking pixel

In order to track email opens, Infusionsoft uses an invisible pixel that tracks whether the email was viewed or not. We’re going to use the same idea with our custom Automation Link.

1. Open your Automation Link by clicking on the [Edit] link on the Automation Link page. (Marketing > Settings > Automation Links > Automation Link). If you still have your Automation Link edit page open from when you were creating it, congrats, you’re a step ahead!
2. Copy the URL from the browser window. It should look something like this: https://ex123.infusionsoft.com/SystemEmailLink/manageSystemEmailLink.jsp?view=edit&ID=96&global=true&popup=true&campaignId=0
3. In the URL, you’ll see a part that says ID= SOME NUMBER. Copy JUST that number.
4. Now, copy the image code below: <img src=“Link-[YOUR-LINK-NUMBER]” alt=“” width=“1” height=“1” />
5. Replace YOUR-LINK-NUMBER with the number you just copied.

Now we’re ready to set up your email!

Create the Tracking Email

1. Go to the email that you want to track opens on Marketing > Campaign Builder > Campaign > Sequence > Email
2. Click the Snippets Tab from the email editor menu
3. Drag the HTML snippet somewhere at the end of your email
4. Paste the Image Code from step 4 above into the text area
5. Click Save

Boom! Good to go!

Aaaand you’re done. Whenever someone opens your email they’ll be automatically tagged in Infusionsoft. You can then set up a separate sequence to deal with people who open (or don’t open) your emails, and track your open and conversion rates by tag in an analytic tool like SegMetrics.

Got any other awesome tips? Please leave them in the comments!