In this post, we'll walk you through setting up an email tracking system that uses a transparent image pixel to capture open events.
Knowing whether recipients open your emails can provide valuable insight for refining communication strategies. Traditional email tracking solutions are often integrated into marketing platforms, but for more custom or with you are using Power Automate to send your marketing emails, you can track email opens using a simple pixel tracker and Microsoft Power Automate.
What Is a Pixel Tracker?
A pixel tracker is an invisible image, usually 1x1 pixel in size, embedded within an email. When a recipient opens the email, their email client downloads the image, triggering a notification that records the open event. This tiny tracker can then provide valuable data such as the number of opens and the time an email is opened.
Setting Up Pixel Tracking with Power Automate
How does it work?
The core of this email tracking system lies in the use of an HTML image tag linked to a Power Automate HTTP request URL. Here’s how it operates at high level:
Embedding the Tracker: Whenever you send an email that you want to track, you’ll embed a 1x1 pixel image tag in the email body. This image tag’s src attribute points to a unique Power Automate HTTP request URL.
Triggering the Power Automate Flow: When the recipient opens the email, their email client tries to load the embedded image by sending a request to the Power Automate URL.
Logging and Serving the Pixel:
Power Automate captures this request, triggering the flow to log that the email has been opened.
The flow then serves the transparent 1x1 pixel image back to the email client, completing the request and rendering the image invisibly to the recipient.
With the basics covered, let’s dive into how to implement this email tracker step-by-step.
Step 1: Create Your Tracking Pixel
Host the Pixel Image: You’ll need to host a transparent 1x1 pixel image file online, either on your server or via cloud storage, like Azure Blob Storage or SharePoint. What is important is that you have an URL and anyone call reach this URL.
Save the URL for later use. With your pixel tracker ready, we can use Power Automate to capture when the image is accessed.
Step 2: Create a Power Automate Flow to Capture Opens
Create a new Power Automate Flow with an HTTP request Trigger:
This step will receive HTTP requests whenever the pixel is accessed.
Configure the HTTP trigger to accept GET requests, as the image URL will send a GET request every time it's loaded.
Configure to allow anyone to trigger the Flow
We’ll add custom parameters to the URL generated by Power Automate. These parameters allow us to capture key tracking details:
email: Identifies the email recipient.
trackID: A short identifier for the campaign.
emailId: Tags each individual email within the campaign to distinguish multiple sends.
Extract Query Parameters
There are many resources available online on how to extract query parameters in an HTTP requet.
We save this parameters into 3 separate Variables
Store information:
Store the captured data in a location that suits your reporting needs, such as SharePoint line, Dataverse, or Excel Online.
Get and Serve the Pixel
Since this HTTP request will be added to an image tag, it needs to serve an image in response to the email client. Here’s how it works:
Add an HTTP call using the URL of the image hosted in our Step 1
We serve this response which end of Flow
Step 3: Embed the Tracking Pixel in Your Email
Add and IMG HTML Tag to your email. URL will be provided by Power Automate (see begining of step 2). To this URL, add our custom parameter too: trackID, email and emailId
Test and Analyze Results
Send a few test emails to verify that the pixel triggers the HTTP request correctly and that Power Automate logs the open events.
If everything works well, you should start seeing entries where the information is stored as soon as the email is opened.
Understanding when recipients open your emails is valuable, but combining it with click-tracking can provide a complete picture of engagement. If you're interested in tracking which links recipients click within your emails, check out our tutorial on how to easily track link clicks in marketing emails using Power Automate. This approach lets you capture in-depth engagement metrics to refine your email strategy for even better results.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial!
Conclusion
Using a pixel tracker with Power Automate is a simple yet powerful way to track email opens. This approach can give you a clearer understanding of how recipients engage with your emails, enabling you to make data-informed decisions and tailor future messaging. Happy tracking!
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