Open tracking is (finally) here!
We’re incredibly excited to announce open tracking. This launch has been a combined effort of months of work from Milan, Eugene, Artem and Igor. We’ve had it in Beta internally for several weeks and know you’re going to love it.
Since Postmark is for transactional emails, we wanted to tailor the feature to a transactional workflow. In typical email marketing, open tracking is important as a holistic number, like knowing the open rate across all recipients. With transactional email, you may be measuring the effectiveness of your drip campaigns, watching the open rates of order confirmations or looking at individual recipient opens.
Track everything #
With open tracking enabled, you can now track a huge list of data points both at a campaign level and the recipient level. For instance:
- Opens by individual
- Opens by tag (campaign)
- Geographic data (City, Country)
- Email client and platform
- Operating system
Individual message open tracking #
You may also want to know who opened a specific email and when. With individual tracking you view a particular email and see who opened it or view a person and see which emails they opened over time. All of the extra data like geography, client, and platform come with it.
To enable open tracking for messages, just set the json parameter “TrackOpens: true” in the API. For SMTP you can use the custom “X-PM-TrackOpens: true” SMTP header.
Campaign open tracking #
In some cases, you may want to know the metrics of specific types of emails such as welcome emails, drip campaigns, comment notifications, etc. By using tags, open tracking data can be combined together across all emails containing that tag. If you want to do A/B tracking, you could use two different tags and rotate between them to compare.
To start tracking opens for a tag right away, use the /stats/outbound/opens endpoint. You can also use the individual tracking method above in combination with a tag for each message.
Open tracking API #
As part of the launch, it was crucial for us to launch an API associated with open tracking. Viewing the data in the Postmark UI is nice, but getting that data back into your application is where it really becomes useful. With API access, you can bring open statistics and actions back into your application to tailor information to your users.
With the open tracking API, you can:
- Enable open tracking on a tag.
- View open tracking statistics across specific dates and tags.
- Search opens based on geo data, platforms, email clients and more.
- Get open statistics for an individual users.
- Get open statistics for a specific message.
Open tracking data can be found through our statistics and opens endpoints. Artem also updated our Ruby and Rails gems to support the new features (more library updates coming soon).
This API endpoint adds to the Statistics API we launched last week.
Webhooks (are live!) #
The API is great for requesting data, but sometimes you want the data pushed to you when it happens. With webhooks we can request a custom uri each time an open happens. Checkout our developer docs to take advantage of the open webhooks.
We hope you love the new open tracking. We’d love to hear some of the things you do with it.
