For professional communicators, such as marketing and PR practitioners, engagement data is invaluable to understand the relevance of your targeting and messaging. High engagement indicates thoughtful targeting and personalized, relevant messaging. Low engagement suggests that more diligence is required. We recommend reading our article on the importance of targeting and the role of media lists.
Let’s take a look at the likely causes of low engagement rates:
you’re emailing recipients too frequently
your content is not valuable to your recipients
your recipients are not expecting to receive mail from you
your emails are flagged by the recipients’ email server and are either not delivered, or end up in their spam folder.
The good news is that these are all factors that are in your control to impact.
Different engagement metrics can give you insights into specific aspects of your outreach efforts that can be optimized to improve performance. You can learn more about that here.
If you'd like to learn more, we'd recommend checking out our prerecorded webinar on 'Crafting Unforgettable Pitches' via our Resources page here or review our ebook 'Marketer's Guide to Media Outreach' here.
How Does Email Tracking Work?
These are three of the most common ways to enable email tracking:
Tracking pixels - these are small, trackable images embedded into the email
Read receipts - enabled through email clients such as Gmail and Outlook
Trackable Links - appended links inserted into the content of the email body
Meltwater offers email tracking through our third-party email provider, which enables tracking through using pixels. Here is how it works.
Tracking Pixels
A tracking pixel is a small, invisible image (hence pixel) that gets loaded from a tracking server with a coded filename. When the email is opened by a recipient, the pixel “fires”, and the email is flagged as opened. Tracking pixels is the most common approach to email tracking.
Why Do I Sometimes See a Discrepancy in the Email Engagement Data?
There are two key reasons why you might see some data discrepancies:
Underreporting - tracking pixels don’t work for all recipients
Data latency - there is some latency in data syncs between our third-party email provider and Meltwater
Underreporting
In practice, email clients (e.g. Gmail and Outlook) don’t always download images by default upon open. If the recipient decides not to download images, the email can still be read, but the “open” will not be logged.
There are ways to limit open rates from being underreported. This requires following email best practices and avoiding spam tactics, such as:
Limit email distributions to small, highly targeted audiences
Well-researched and personalized pitches that add value to your recipient(s)
Consider whether the timing of your pitch is right for your recipient(s)
Implement DKIM/SPF when using third-party services to authenticate your domain to ensure optimal deliverability. You can learn more about that here.
Data Latency
Data syncs happen every 5-10 minutes between Meltwater and our third-party email provider. The data is synced sequentially by metric type (see the list of metrics below). This means that minor latency should be expected before the data refreshes in our product:
Sent
Opens
Clicked (for links within an email)
Bounced
Blocked
💡 Tip
Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.
Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.