Zoho Email Open Tracking - Tools to Make It Work

Did you know Zoho Mail doesn’t have built-in email open tracking?

The good news is that you can still track opens with external tools.

In this post, we’ll show you tools for tracking opens for your Zoho Mail account.

Zoho Mail Limitations ❌

Zoho Mail doesn’t offer open tracking of any kind.

This means it doesn’t even offer a feature to send read receipt requests, which Gmail (paid Workspace accounts only) and Outlook do have.

So, to actually track opens for emails sent with your Zoho Mail account, you need external tools.

Email Open Tracking Limitations ⚠️

Before we get to the actual tools, you need to know something important.

Open tracking is no longer an accurate metric of your email outreach success.

The tracking pixel (an invisible image included in emails to track opens) used to be a reliable device for open tracking, but not anymore.

So what happened?

Email service providers have given recipients features to protect their privacy. These features have made the life of the tracking pixel much harder.

Tracking pixels once only loaded when a recipient opened an email, but new scenarios now interfere with their proper functioning.

The tracking pixel can now:

1. ➡️ Get preloaded, causing opens to register even if the recipient never opens the email
2. ➡️ Get blocked altogether, causing no opens to register even if the recipient opens the email

The result is that your open rates can get inflated or deflated.

One thing is for sure: unless new tracking technology surfaces, accurate open rates are a thing of the past.

Does that mean that tracking email opens is useless?

No, you’ll still want to keep an eye on them.

Extremely low open rates may indicate an email deliverability problem, which you must address.

Email trackers for Zoho Mail 📊

So, how do you actually track opens on emails sent with your Zoho Mail account?

As mentioned earlier, you can’t track opens inside the Zoho Mail interface.

However, you can use external email clients or go full-professional with a sales engagement platform. You can connect your Zoho Mail account to both.

Email Clients that Track Email Opens 👀

Since Zoho Mail supports IMAP and SMTP, you can easily connect your account to an external email client.

Most email clients, though, don’t support open tracking.

Fortunately, there are some that do. You can find two of them below. ⬇️

Mailbird

Mailbird is an email client that works on Windows and Mac.

You can connect your Zoho Mail account to Mailbird and track the opens of the emails you send. You can track individual emails or turn on open tracking for all emails.

Mailbird’s free version does not feature open tracking, but its paid plans start at an affordable $4.03/month.

Don’t like to pay monthly fees? Pay a one-time $99.99 for a lifetime subscription.

Canary Mail

Available for Windows, Mac, and iOS, Canary Mail lets you send read receipt requests with your emails.

Read receipt requests aren’t ideal, as the recipient must confirm that they’ve “read” your email by clicking on the request. If they don’t, the open won’t be registered.

Some recipients also consider read receipts intrusive, even though they’re a transparent way of tracking opens.

The request read receipt feature is available in any Canary Mail plan, but the free plan only offers limited open tracking.

Sales Engagement Platforms That Track Opens 💼

For professional email open tracking, sales engagement platforms could be just what you need.

Their tracking goes beyond opens and often also includes reply rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate or meetings booked rate.

Let’s discuss two sales engagement tools that provide comprehensive email tracking:

lemlist

lemlist is a sales engagement platform that lets you create outreach campaigns through multiple channels like email, LinkedIn (chat and voice messages), and cold calls.

Its standout capability is its array of personalization features. In your campaigns, you can include text variables, personalized images, custom videos, dynamic landing pages, and liquid syntax (custom code variables that will automatically adapt to your lead’s info).

Through Zoho’s IMAP and SMTP servers, you can connect your Zoho account to lemlist and send targeted, personalized campaigns while maintaining deliverability and tracking engagement metrics like opens, clicks, and replies:

lemlist starts at $32/month and also offers a 14-day free trial.

Mailshake

Mailshake also offers outreach through email, LinkedIn, and cold calls, but its feature set is less impressive than lemlist’s.

You can either connect your Zoho email account through Zoho’s IMAP and SMTP servers or use Mailshake’s Zoho 3rd party integration via Zapier.

Once your Zoho account is connected to Mailshake, you can track opens for any email you send.

The cool part of Mailshake is that you can send 250 emails per month for free. For more emails and advanced features, you need one of Mailshake’s paid plans, which start at $49/month.

The Final Thought 💭

Even though Zoho Mail does not offer built-in email open tracking, you still have plenty of external options to monitor your open rates.

Whether you use external email clients or full-blown sales engagement platforms like lemlist, you can still track opens and get insights into your deliverability.

Though open rates are no longer accurate due to privacy features, they can still serve as an important metric to spot potential deliverability issues.