See when your emails are delivered, opened and clicked-on with Accelo

With the new Activities module and Inbox, we've been seeing a lot more people using Accelo as their main work email interface. The lack of distractions from non-work emails, ability to see when your colleagues have replied to an email without having to ask them "did you already get this" first and the ease of logging your time while you type are reasons we've heard from our users - today, we're adding another one which we think you'll really like.

Starting today, we'll be launching a new Email Event Tracking feature that enables you to see when people receive, open or click on links in emails that you send out from Accelo.

Find out who receives, opens or clicks on your emails

When you create an activity in Accelo, an email is (often) also emailed out to client contacts and colleagues. With the new Email Event Tracking feature, you'll be keeping track of when emails are delivered, opened and clicked on by the people you send them too.

To see who's received, opened or clicked on a link, look at the activity in the bottom of the right hand side you'll see a list (oldest to newest) of these delivery, open and click events.

• Received: when we successfully deliver the email to your client's email server, we'll track an event saying it was received. Note: because Accelo also often sends emails to your colleagues (sometimes many of them) we don't show the "received" timestamps for your colleagues because in our internal beta testing it was just too noisy.
• Opened: when someone opens an Accelo Activity email, most mail programs will load the "rich text" or HTML version (so they can see links and logos and other prettythings). Unless the user has set their mail client to block images from loading, we'll load a small, invisible image in the bottom of the email which will then let us know the email was opened. 
• Clicked: when someone clicks on an email, before they go over to the website in the link, they very quickly bounce off our servers so we can see that they clicked on a specific link. We'll then show the activity event and the "link" section on the screen will show you what link they clicked on (so you can click on it too if you're curious).

Know exactly when to follow up

How many times have you wished you could see if a client has opened an email you send them before you follow up with a call? How about those times you've emailed a client with something important and you're sweating on an answer, but don't want to nag them? What about if you're following up and a client says they never got your email - wouldn't it be nice to know when it was delivered to their mailbox?

Well, now with Accelo you can do all this and more with Email Event Tracking.

Get notified on your email events

While all this functionality is handy if you're looking back at an activity you've previously sent (or really care about and you're watching), the emails that you personally send to clients tend to be more important. To make it easier to know when a client has opened an email or clicked on a link, you'll also receive a new notification which you can see in the navigation bar.

You'll know you've got a new notification (generally) because you'll see all unread notifications in red; when you click on the link we'll clear them (like Facebook does), and if you want to see a full history there's a link at the bottom of the box to load up a full list of your recent notifications.

A few limitations...

The great thing is that you don't need to do anything to take advantage of this functionality - it is already enabled and running right now on your Accelo account - you just need to send your activities from Accelo.

There are a couple of limitations though:

• We can't do our tricks with links and open images when you're sending out from Outlook or Gmail and using our other ways of pulling or copying emails into Accelo - the magic only works when you are sending the email from Accelo.
• While we can be sure when we've delivered an email successfully to the recipients email server (with the received event), there are sometimes things (like spam filtering or their own message rules) that could get between this delivery and the contact's email inbox.
• If people choose not to load images in their mail program (or if their mail program doesn't show images), we don't know if the user has opened the message. However, we always know when someone clicks on a link.