Email Open and Click Tracking

Overview

UniSignIn can record when a registered user opens a newsletter or clicks a link in it. Opens and clicks become profile fields you can use in Segments and targeting, for example to re-engage subscribers who stopped opening.

Tracking works with any email service that can insert a value per recipient, such as Mailchimp merge tags or AWS SES template data.

How it works

UniSignIn creates two personal links for every registered user and includes them in the user data it sends to your email service:

• email_open_url: an invisible 1×1 image that records the open
• email_click_url: a link that records the click and then redirects. Add the address you want to link to at the end, URL-encoded.

The links are unique to each recipient and can't be guessed, so opens and clicks can't be faked.

Mailchimp

UniSignIn syncs your users to Mailchimp, see MailChimp.

1. In your Mailchimp audience, add two text merge fields, e.g. UNISOPEN and UNISCLICK.
2. In the UniSignIn MailChimp integration settings, map email_open_url to UNISOPEN and email_click_url to UNISCLICK.
3. In your newsletter template, add the open pixel anywhere in the body:

<img src="*|UNISOPEN|*" width="1" height="1" alt="" />

4. Start each link you want to track with the click merge tag, followed by the URL-encoded address:

<a href="*|UNISCLICK|*https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Farticle">Read more</a>

AWS SES and other email services

1. Turn on the HTTP Webhook integration. The user data it sends includes email_open_url and email_click_url.
2. Store both values with the subscriber in your system.
3. Pass them as template data when you send, e.g. with an AWS SES template:

<img src="{{email_open_url}}" width="1" height="1" alt="" />
<a href="{{email_click_url}}https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Farticle">Read more</a>

{
  "email_open_url": "https://secure.signinservice.com/api/v1/email/o/…",
  "email_click_url": "https://secure.signinservice.com/api/v1/email/c/…?url="
}

Profile fields

Opens and clicks are added to the registered user's profile as Email opens (last 30 days), Email clicks (last 30 days), Last email open and Last email click.

Example segment, subscribers who stopped opening: the newsletter field equals true and Email opens (last 30 days) equals 0.