Ever wish you could read your recipient’s mind? You can get pretty close to it with email tracking.

Tracking tells you:

• When your messages are opened, clicked, and re-opened in real-time
• On what device your message was opened
• When your links are clicked

… all so you can follow up smarter!

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Here's a how-to video (or continue reading for step-by-step directions):

How It Works

When you send an email with Yesware, we embed an invisible pixel at the end of your outgoing message.

This way, when your message is opened, you’ll receive a notification letting you know.

The best part? Your recipient won’t see a thing. Unlike read receipts, our tracking pixel is completely invisible. So, you gain insights while your recipient has the same experience as usual.

Send a Tracked email

Let’s send a tracked email!

Compose an email as usual and just make sure that the Track checkbox is checked.

Your email won’t look any different and your recipient will have the same experience - the only difference is that we embed the invisible tracking pixel.

Tip: You can check your Tracking settings by hovering over the Track Button. To change your settings, go to the Yesware menu (at the top left of Gmail), then click on Preferences. Toggle on Track Opens and/or Track Links.

With Track Links toggled ON, you’ll be able to see any link clicked within your email. Just be sure to follow our best practices.

To track attachments uploaded from your computer, click on the blue paperclip icon:

Once you choose the file you’d like to track, insert it and click send. The tracked attachment will appear as a stylized link in your message.

Handy tip: Looking to track attachments using Google Drive? You’ll want to make sure that Link Tracking is enabled so that you can attach it as a tracked link.

If you’re sending a PDF or PPT, you can see detailed per-page and per-viewer engagement with presentation tracking. 

Follow up with Smarter Tracking

You get notifications as soon as your recipients open a tracked email or link. We’ll let you know 1) when they opened it and 2) what device they used to read it.

You’ll see a pop-up notification in real-time but you can also access tracking event data in a few places: the Activity Feed, in your inbox/sent folders, or within an email thread.

Want to see your entire history of Tracking events? Check out the Activity Feed.

Note that if there were multiple recipients on the email, we cannot differentiate between recipient opens, so the notification will show as “Eleanor Shellstrop or 5 others opened,” for example.

Filter by Recent Activity, Not Opened, and Opened/Not Replied to better prioritize.

Filter by Scheduled to see future, scheduled activity, like any Reminders you’ve set or emails you’ve scheduled using Send Later.

To see a more detailed view that shows all tracking activity for a given thread, just click on the event within the Activity Feed. By more easily understanding tracking engagement, you can follow up smarter.

Handy Tip: You can click on the subject line within the Activity Feed to go to the email thread if you’d like to follow up.

You can use the Tracking icons in your Inbox and Sent folders to see at a quick glance who’s engaging with your emails.

When the eye’s dark blue, you can hover over it to see recent activity.

If you go to an email thread, you can click on Tracking at the top of the thread to see all tracking engagement for that thread.

This is a great reference point if you’re trying to craft a reply and want a better sense of past engagement on the thread.

Best Practices

Sometimes, recipients have their images disabled. In this case, our tracking pixel won't be loaded, and we won't be able to notify you that the message has been opened. As such, we suggest that Yesware users have a signature line with images contained in them to encourage recipients to display messages.
Just be aware that if the message was sent to several people, colleagues were CC'ed, or the message was forwarded, we cannot differentiate between recipient opens. Even still, our customers tell us it is fascinating to see when "somebody" opened their message several times. That either means they love your email or it is being forwarded throughout the organization.

You can also enable Link Tracking to see what content your prospects are interested in. This tracked link won't change the look of the message but may cause some issues if your recipients' spam filters are high. In these cases, try formatting your links as words, rather than full URLs (i.e. "Check out our website" vs. "Check out www.yesware.com.") This ensures that your message ends up in your recipient's inbox.

Privacy and Legality

Yes, it is legal for us to track all of this information. This technology has been used for almost 20 years in the marketing world. We are partially funded by Google Ventures and work with them to monitor any legislation that may prove otherwise. Our strict terms of use outline how the tracking information is used, and we'll discontinue any accounts that violate these terms. The personal information that we collect is for our application purposes, and we'll never share any information without your consent. You can read more about our privacy policy here. Have a question that wasn’t covered in any of the above? Feel free to view our FAQ and send us any questions at support@yesware.com. We’re here to help and we’d love to hear from you!