Recently I was asked by a client how she could track which recipients were opening her e-mail messages (without using a read receipt). It turned out to be a pretty easy process, after finding this article: http://dyn.com/blog/tracking-email-opens-via-google-analytics/. As a note of caution, Apple at least offers Mail Privacy Protection which blocks this ability.
Anyways, as you can see from that blog post, the trick is embedding an image in the source of your e-mail. In my testing, the above process usually also works when images aren’t being loaded in the e-mail client (at least in Outlook – I assume the e-mail client must actually be loading the image, but doesn’t render it until the user selects “Display Pictures”). Here’s an example how I structured my image tag:
<img src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-31849006-1&cid=fake@colostate.edu&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=My%20Fun%20Campaign%20-%20fake@colostate.edu&cs=newsletter&cm=email&cn=My%20Fun%20Campaign” />
You can view your data within Google Analytics, under Real-Time –> Events within seconds.
Or, if you are viewing non-live data (eg, data from an hour ago), see Behavior –> Events –> Overview –> click “email” under Event Category –> change Primary Dimension to “Event Action” then click “open” to view the same data as noted above.
The reason why I’m prepending the Campaign name before the e-mail address is so that I can more easily distinguish between separate e-mail campaigns without leaving the page. This way, you can easily use the search box (depicted in the screen shot) to isolate campaigns or individuals.
Happy tracking!