Monitoring email performance is crucial for understanding audience engagement with your content, allowing you to enhance your email marketing strategies.
By implementing email tracking in WordPress, you can keep an eye on key metrics such as opens, clicks, and other engagement statistics to refine your campaigns and expand your business. Additionally, this tracking ensures timely delivery of important emails and enables you to resend any undelivered messages.
At CanadaCreate, we distribute newsletter emails to our readers to increase traffic to our website. We track open and click rates to gauge user engagement with our content and discover opportunities to enhance our email marketing tactics.
In this article, we will guide you through the simple process of setting up email tracking in WordPress and accessing essential insights about your email performance.
Important Note:This article focuses specifically on emails sent from your WordPress site, including order confirmations, password reset notifications, contact form follow-ups, and more. It does not cover marketing emails sent through your email marketing service, as those already include built-in tracking for opens and clicks.
Why Should You Implement Email Tracking in WordPress?
Tracking emails sent from your WordPress site allows you to monitor who opens and clicks on your messages. You can also access comprehensive reports on email deliverability.
This ensures that all emails from your website successfully reach your users. Email tracking can assist you with the following tasks:
- Identify which links within your emails are being clicked.
- Confirm that crucial emails for membership sites and online courses are being sent.
- Verify the delivery of emails sent by specific plugins.
- Make sure that order and confirmation emails from your online store reach your customers.
- Enhance the deliverability of emails related to new user registrations, password resets, comments, WordPress updates, and more.
Whether you operate a blog or a small business website, WordPress automatically sends email notifications to your users. It’s essential to ensure that all emails from your site land in your users’ inboxes instead of their spam folders.
The most effective way to achieve this is by utilizing an SMTP service provider to enhance email deliverability. For further information, refer to our guide on resolving the WordPress email sending issues.
Now, let’s explore the step-by-step process for setting up email tracking in WordPress.
Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Email Tracking in WordPress
The simplest method to implement email tracking in WordPress is by using WP Mail SMTP, the leading SMTP plugin trusted by over 3 million websites.
This plugin enables you to effortlessly send all your WordPress emails through an SMTP server, significantly enhancing email deliverability.
Additionally, the plugin provides features to monitor open and click rates, troubleshoot delivery problems, enable email logging, and create reports that display deliverability statistics.
Step 1: Install and Configure WP Mail SMTP
Begin by installing and activating the WP Mail SMTP plugin. For detailed instructions, refer to our beginner’s guide on installing a WordPress plugin.
Important Note:The plugin offers a free version, but you will need the pro plan to access email tracking and logging features.
After activation, navigate to the WP Mail SMTP » Settings section in the WordPress dashboard to input your license key. Then, click the ‘Verify key’ button.
You can find this information in your account on the WP Mail SMTP website.
Once completed, scroll down to the ‘Mailer’ section to select an SMTP service provider to integrate with the plugin.
This service will work in conjunction with WP Mail SMTP to ensure reliable email delivery.
Setting up email tracking is straightforward with popular providers like SendLayer (our top recommendation), SMTP.com, Brevo, Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid, Amazon SES, and others.
Click on your chosen mailer to access detailed setup instructions. The default option is the PHP mailer, but we advise against using it due to its unreliability.
For assistance with configuring your SMTP server, refer to our comprehensive guide on using a free SMTP server for sending emails through WordPress.
Step 2: Activate WordPress Email Tracking
After installing the plugin, it’s time to enable the email logging and tracking features.
Once activated, the plugin will automatically insert a tracking pixel into every email sent from your WordPress site.
To proceed, navigate to the WP Mail SMTP » Settings page and select the ‘Email Log’ tab. Then, simply toggle the ‘Enable Log’ switch to ‘ON.’
This feature captures essential information about your emails and saves it in your WordPress database. It is also necessary to enable this feature if you wish to resend emails through WordPress.
Here, you will find additional options to enhance your email tracking capabilities. We recommend activating all available switches to gather comprehensive email tracking data.
First, you can opt to save a copy of the email content. This feature allows you to search through email texts and resend the entire email if it fails to deliver. To enable this, simply turn on the ‘Log Email Content’ switch.
Next, you can activate the ‘Save Attachments’ switch to keep a copy of any attachments sent from your site. This is useful if an email fails to send and you need to resend the attachment.
After that, you can monitor when an email is opened and which links are clicked. Make sure to toggle on the ‘Open Email Tracking’ and ‘Click Link Tracking’ switches.
Once you’ve done that, you can specify a duration for how long to retain your email logs. If disk space is a concern, you can adjust this setting here.
Select your preferred duration from the ‘Log Retention Period’ dropdown menu. Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to apply your settings.
For further details, check out our tutorial on setting up email logs in WordPress.
Step 3: Review Email Tracking Analytics Data in WordPress
After configuring the plugin and sending your WordPress emails, you can access your email tracking and analytics data.
To do this, navigate to the WP Mail SMTP » Email Log section in your WordPress admin dashboard. Here, you will find essential email metrics, including opens and clicks, providing a quick snapshot of your audience’s engagement.
You can also access individual email logs for detailed information. Just hover over an email and click the ‘View Log’ link.
This will open a new screen displaying email details such as the sending time, subject line, whether the email was opened, and more.
You can also export and print the individual email log from this screen.
Resend New User Emails in WordPress
Another useful feature of WP Mail SMTP is the option to resend emails. You can do this by going to the WP Mail SMTP » Email Log section.
This page lists all the emails you have sent along with their delivery status. A red dot indicates an email that was not sent, while a green dot signifies successful delivery.
To resend an email, hover over the undelivered message and click the ‘View Log’ link.
This will take you to the log screen for that specific email.
Scroll down to the ‘Action’ section on the right and click the ‘Resend’ button.
This will prompt you to confirm the email address used for sending emails.
Click the ‘Yes’ button to proceed with resending your email.
If you have multiple emails that failed to send, you can use the bulk resend feature from the email log screen.
Check the boxes next to the unsent emails and select ‘Resend’ from the dropdown menu. Remember to click the ‘Apply’ button afterward.
A similar popup will appear on your screen.
Click the ‘Yes’ button to resend the email to multiple recipients.
Access WordPress Email Engagement Statistics
You can view your complete email tracking and reporting data by navigating to the WP Mail SMTP » Email Reports page.
This will take you to a screen displaying detailed statistics about your open rates and email deliverability.
Below the main graph, you will find a breakdown of the performance of your individual emails.
Here, you can view open rates, click-through rates, deliverability metrics, and additional data.
Bonus: Utilize Contact Forms to Expand Your Email List
With email tracking successfully set up, it’s time to expand your email list. The simplest way to capture leads is through contact forms.
These forms offer a secure method for users to inquire, schedule your services, or provide feedback while enabling you to gather valuable user information.
Additionally, you can link these forms to email marketing platforms to automate email sending, increase subscribers, create newsletters, and more.
For building an email list using forms, we recommend WPForms, the leading contact form plugin for WordPress.
It features a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder, over 2,000 pre-designed templates (including email form templates), conditional logic, and robust spam protection.
Moreover, you can integrate this tool with email marketing services like Constant Contact to launch drip campaigns, send welcome emails, decrease abandoned cart rates, and create segmented user lists.
For further information, check out our tutorial on using a contact form to enhance your email list.
We hope this article has guided you in setting up email tracking in WordPress. You might also find our beginner’s guide on configuring WordPress email settings and our tutorial on tracking customer journeys with MemberPress helpful.
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