Actually, yes, you can track certain activity in a plain text email – you can track link clicks, but not email opens…
Tracking Email Opens in Plain Text Emails
You cannot track email opens in a truly “plain text” email. Here’s why:
The only technique for tracking email opens, the one used by all the email providers and all the marketing automation platforms, relies on HTML.
The HTML is used to insert a tiny, invisible image (often a transparent 1 pixel by 1 pixel .gif). When Outlook (or Gmail or whatever you use to open your email) opens the email, Outlook makes a request for this gif. Your email provider watches for these requests. That’s how we report to you that your email has been opened.
If you send a “true” plain text email, well, by definition it will not contain any HTML and therefore will not request the .gif and therefore we can’t tell you whether your email was opened or not.
It’s become common to send HTML emails that use very plain looking formatting. This allows the email to look like “plain text” when it’s actually an HTML email. This allows your “plain text looking” email to track opens.
Many of our marketing emails use this technique. These emails appear more personal and get read more often than image heavy HTML.
Here’s a screenshot of an automated followup email we send. It appears to be just text but it’s actually HTML and fully trackable…
Tracking Email Clicks in Plain Text Emails
Tracking clicks in a plain text email is 100% doable but there’s a step involved to ensure your email doesn’t look like arse…
When you launch an email through any system that tracks opens and clicks, the URL you link to gets changed up a bit to make the tracking work.
So if I want to link to Net-Results I would link to https://explore.net-results.com/hello.
But when my email gets sent a bunch of additional information gets appended to the link so you can tell things like…
- who was the email sent to?
- which email was it they clicked from?
- which link did they click on ?
- which campaign sent this email?
…so now my link may look like this:
explore.net-results.com/hello?contact_id=2&email_id=17&link_id=652&campaign_id=65252
This link is trackable but you don’t want to send links like this in your plain text emails. The answer is to use a URL shortener.
A URL shortener can direct someone to the ugly URL above without showing the recipient all your tracking variables.
Google offers a free URL shortener, and modern marketing platforms (like Net-Results, where I work) can shorten URLs in plain text emails specifically for tracking purposes.
Links shortened with Net-Results end up looking like https://result.ma/4a8idao. When your recipient clicks that link they are redirected to the destination you wanted them to go to and the click is tracked.
Is there an advantage to sending “true” plain text emails?
Our data shows that their really isn’t much impact. We commonly send plain looking emails that are actually HTML.
