Sending emails from Planhat, but delivered through your Gmail/Outlook, is a wonderful way to make valuable use of Planhat's data. With email engagement tracking, you ensure you have the right feedback data to take action and improve your own outreach strategies.
1. Email Automation in Planhat
Emails automation in Planhat is used across a number of use cases:
I need to send an email to all decision makers at West Coast-based companies with products A and B because we just had a big outage
I have an automated sequence of training videos delivered via emails to endusers that recently signed up
I am trying to get endusers to sign up for our webinar series, and need to experiment with a couple of different outreach and content strategies
We just released a product update and the product team wants to share a summary with a particular set of endusers, based on their usage and role
I need to drive collection of overdue invoices, so want to email the procurement team at those companies
...
To solve these use cases, you use a combination of tools:
To run automated sequences: use Sequence Workflows + email templates to set up email sequences that can be conditionally driven by any relevant data point in Planhat (read more here)
To send single emails: simply right-click the top-right corner of an enduser profile, or bring up the email editor with OPT+C, to send an individual email
To send bulk emails: use our filters to identify a group of enduser who you want to email, and then select all + send email to send out either as 1 email with multiple recipients or multiple emails to each individual enduser
2. Email engagement tracking in Planhat
With email engagement tracking, you ensure you can take appropriate follow-up action from an initial email, and analyse the performance of different outreach strategies. Below, we will walk through how to enable engagement tracking and then how to follow-up and analyse.
2.1 Sending emails with link tracking
Use the "open" and "link" tracking icons to turn tracking on and off. This can be done both in the email editor when sending something manually, or on the email template level when sending automated emails (eg, via automations or Workflows). "Reply" tracking will always be on.
Generally, use this when emailing directly with a single enduser. If you send an individual email to multiple recipients, we'll only attribute outcomes to the first enduser on the list.
2.2 Following up and analysing performance
Some common use cases for follow-up:
Get a list of emails that weren't opened or clicked in a particular send-out (ask your CSM on how to approach this best for your particular use case)
Get a personal notification via Email/Slack/Desktop when an email is engaged with
Analyse the click/open/reply rates of different outreach strategies
The simplest way of exploring email engagement analytics is to use the Page template we've built, available in the Pages library!
Use the Email Engagement object
To analyse
Click, Open and Reply Rate- use those fields and split by what you want to understand better. For example, a vertical bar chart with Average Click Rate per Email TemplateUse filters to only show the subset you care about, for example: Average Open Rate split by Email Template when used in a particular Workflow
There are also company and enduser metrics on outcomes, and rates on the Workflow level, which is helpful in Automations and when analysing entire campaigns.
2.3 Finding cohorts and lists of endusers who did / did not engage
In Planhat, you can (almost) always solve your use case! In the v1, this use case relies on cross-model filters - but in the future we'll build out more native functionality. Work with your CSM to set it up, or see below how to filter Conversations using the Email Opened/Clicked/Replied properties.
3. Technical summary and definitions
Overview:
Naturally, we can only track emails sent from Planhat and we can only react to outcomes if the reply is synced to Planhat too (eg, check if email integration is enabled and/or if you have any email filters active)
Some definitions of the object Email Engagement:
Each record on the Email Engagement object is created by an email sent with any tracking enabled
The Open/Click/Reply Rates per email can have the following values:
0 = email not opened/clicked/replied-to
100 = email opened/clicked/replied-to
null = tracking not enabled (only possible for Open/Click rate as Reply rate is always tracked)
A Reply is defined as any reply to the tracked email by an enduser, excluding any internal users. This will be counted even if the recipient forwards it to a colleague who then replies to the email
A Link clicked is defined as any link clicked in the email. So if you have multiple links in one email, then we'll track all of them and Reply Rate will be set to 100 as soon as any of the links are clicked
We only attribute email engagement outcomes to 1 enduser, so if you send an email to multiple recipients then Planhat will pick the first one in the list of recipients. Note that this is true for replies too, so when you email two endusers (Sofia and Jonas), tracking is assigned to Sofia, and Jonas replies, Sofia still "gets" the reply
If you send a first email with tracking enabled and then send another email in the same thread with tracking enabled, you've created two records. Outcomes are attributed only to the relevant individual email, for example:
You send Email 1 to an enduser, and then reply with Email 2 in the same thread, and then you get a reply from the enduser
Email 2 will get a reply, email 1 won't (assuming the enduser doesn't actually press the reply on the first email)
Link clicks and opens can happen on both emails 1 and 2, so it simply depends on what the enduser does
A note on the data quality of email open tracking
As you may know, the data quality of open tracking is questionable given that some email clients pre-open emails for security reasons. This mainly leads to a risk of false positives, where it seems like a user opened but didn't. Note this when you look at statistics and create workflows - generally link and reply tracking are much more reliable metrics.
Future roadmap and use cases
As more and more users use Planhat's email capabilities, naturally we want to build them out. Some key areas we'll improve on:
Ability to let email outcomes guide conditional email sequences (coming 2024)
More out-of-the-box “within-campaign” conversion analytics; we have analytics per campaign (outcomes, time-to-complete, etc) but not to eg, analyse paths within Workflows
Bounce tracking
Native UTM support to strengthen analytics further
Ability to cc/bcc from Sequences (eg, as part of a campaign, add two “variant” email templates to one step —> Planhat will send 50/50 in a first batch of emails —> when statistical significance achieved on which performs best, automatically use that in rest of sequences)