How to use email and document tracking together

Does your sales team fly blind when they send sales collateral to your precious customers? Tracking your emails and documents can significantly help you close more deals faster.

Whether it is marketing or sales content, it sounds cliché, but content is still king today!

As salespeople, after marketing hands off qualified leads, we typically start sending sales content as part of our sales outreach program, like articles, presentations, brochures, white papers, proposals, etc., anything that helps us close more deals faster.

Since email is still our primary means of communication, when we talk about sharing sales content with our prospects, we typically mean sending either a link or a document as an old-fashioned email attachment.

And once we hit the send button, the next thing we want to know is what happens with our email and how our prospects get engaged with it. Did they open it? Did they click the link? Which part of the document did they like the most? 

When you get real-time notifications on sales engagement, you can achieve two important things to close more deals:

1. You get a much higher chance of hitting the perfect timing with your follow-up
2. By analyzing the engagement performance, you can optimize and personalize your sales pitch and content to increase your close rate

Thanks to modern technology, there are several vendors out there providing email and document tracking services, but what are the critical things you have to take into consideration when using this software?

What can you track?

With email and document tracking solutions, you can track several things on how your customers get engaged with your sales content:

• Opens Email: Although it is not a clear signal that your customer is interested in what you wrote, it’s a potential indicator. Especially if they open your email more than once.
• Clicks Link: When your customer clicks a link in your email (to sales content like a blog article, video, or other resources), that’s a solid signal that she is at least interested in that particular resource.
• Views Document: This is probably the clearest engagement indicator, especially when you know how much time your prospect spends on which part (implementation, price, terms, etc.) of your document. So that you get valuable insight on how to keep the deal moving forward.
• Forwards Email/Document: Forwarding your email and/or document to another decision maker is an important indicator that you have to take immediate action.
• Downloads Document: This is a mixed signal. Because you can never know what the intention behind is. Are they going to print it? Send it to someone else?
• Prints Document: Most of the time, when a prospect prints your document, she will present it to a higher authority or use it in a meeting.
• Location: Knowing the precise location from where the prospect has opened your email/document can mean a lot, depending on your business.
• Device Type: Again, depending on what you are selling, the type of device on which your customer takes an action (opens your email, views your document, etc.) might be valuable insight.

Where can you track: Inbox vs. CRM?

Another important aspect is how well your tracking software integrates with your CRM. Many email and document tracking solutions are only integrated into your inbox (typically Gmail or Outlook). However, most salespeople don’t want to waste time switching back and forth between sales tools, and they want to be able both send and track their emails/documents directly from their CRM.  

Document tracking vs. email tracking

Email tracking is quite a primitive method for sales tracking. Although it helps you get notified when someone opens an email and clicks the links inside your email, it has several drawbacks:

1. Weak Indicators: Email engagement metrics like “email opens” are weak indicators of real sales engagement. Just because your prospect opens your email doesn’t mean he is interested in your proposal.
2. Attachment Tracking: Email attachments don’t let you track anything. And most major email tracking solutions notify you only when your recipient opens your attachment, but nothing more. Document tracking solutions, on the other hand, provide you with all the details of how the recipient engages with the document, like page views, downloads, prints, etc.
3. File Size: With emails, you are almost limited with the file size. And it’s never a good idea to send your customer a large file by email. With document tracking solutions, you don’t have such limitations.

Email and document tracking solutions are great tools to equip your salesforce with valuable insights on how your customers engage with your sales content, especially when used together. If you want to improve your sales performance, you better start tracking your emails and documents today.