What is the Best Free Email Tracker for Gmail? 4 of our Top Picks

In today’s fast-paced digital world, email communication remains a cornerstone for both personal and professional interactions.

Whether you’re a marketer seeking to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns or an individual curious about your recipient’s engagement, email tracking tools have become invaluable.

Among the plethora of options available, finding the best free email tracker for Gmail can be a daunting task.

However, fret not, as we embark on a journey to explore a remarkable solution that seamlessly integrates with Gmail, empowers your email tracking endeavors, and provides valuable insights to optimize your communication strategy.

Get ready to uncover the perfect ally that simplifies tracking like never before.

First things first, however…

What is an email tracker, specifically for Gmail?

An email tracker is a piece of software that allows users to track activity surrounding an email message, such as time opened, total opens, link clicks, and more. In this case, this email tracker is either exclusive to or has functionality with Gmail.

This works by inserting a small, invisible tracking pixel into the body of your emails, and when that email is interacted with by the recipient, it sends a signal back to the sender’s server that indicates the email has been interacted with.

What is the best free email tracker for Gmail?

Here is our shortlist of the best free email tracker for Gmail:

• GMass – best overall
• Yesware – best for analytics
• Saleshandy – best for cold email
• Email Meter – best for teams

GMass is an all-in-one email tracking solution for individuals, marketers, enterprises, and more.

Using GMass, you can do anything from sending bulk emails past Gmail’s normal limits to maximizing email deliverability to gaining insight from detailed tracking and analytics dashboards.

Their feature suite is comprehensive, including standard email marketing features, transactional emails, email tracking, list management, and much more. It is a behemoth of a platform that can do literally anything email related, and it can do email tracking for Gmail better than most other platforms.

Features:

Email Tracking

GMas gives users access to two metrics to track email opens in real-time: open tracking and link tracking. To activate both, all you need to do is tick two boxes and you’re done; your email tracking has started and will be displayed on the GMass analytics dashboard.

Boring explanation about email tracking below:

Email tracking relies on tracking pixels to function, which are single-pixel graphics that are loaded whenever a recipient opens an email. They are technically visible if you don’t camouflage them, but they tend to be transparent or blend in with the background color of the email.

These are inserted using code in the email’s HTML code. This code contains an external link to the pixel server, and if a user visits or opens the email, the HTML is processed by the client, A.K.A. the browser or app opening the email. This opens the link to the invisible pixel and is registered in the pixel server’s log files, and that is how the data gets from the recipient to you.

Campaign Analytics

Once your tracking pixel fires, the data has to go somewhere to be visible to you. Fortunately, GMass makes visualizing this data a breeze and provides an intuitive dashboard layout where you can analyze all kinds of email data.

You can see your analytics in several ways: through Gmail itself, in the GMass dashboard, or through web-based reports. These include a live feed showing opens, clicks, and unsubscribes in real time so you can watch your campaign progress as it happens.

Breaking Gmail’s Limits

One of the biggest gripes marketers and power users of Gmail have is the daily sending cap, at 500 for normal Gmail accounts and 2,000 for Google Workspace accounts.

However, GMass can bypass this limit without breaking Google’s terms of service.

This is done through an external SMTP server like GMass’s, with which Gmail allows you to send emails beyond your account’s limit. Plus, when using GMass’s SMTP server, the deliverability is the same as with Gmail;’s native server, so your emails will always get to where you want them to go.

Pricing: As this article implies, GMass is free as a Chrome extension, but with some restrictions. Their paid plans start at $19.95/mo for unlimited contacts, custom tracking, mail merge, and more.

Yesware for Gmail is an email tracking platform that helps sales teams track, measure, and optimize your email performance directly from the inbox.

With Yesware, you can compile all of your email data on a monthly basis to create dashboards perfect for email tracking purposes and gaining insights from them.

Features:

Email Analytics Dashboard

Yesware makes Gmail email tracking incredibly simple by displaying all of the relevant information that comes from tracking email on one intuitive dashboard.

From there, these insights can be used to gather feedback and identify trends so sales teams can figure out where to allocate their resources or what direction their next sales push should go.

Email Tracking

In order to display information on a fancy email analytics dashboard, you have to have data to get that information from in the first place. Luckily, Yesware’s email tracker gathers all the information you’ll ever need from your outbound emails.

You can get real-time notifications when recipients interact with your emails, click on links, view attachments, and much more using their invisible tracking pixel embedded at the end of all your marketing emails.

You can also track the performance of specific email templates and see if you need to make any adjustments to your strategy.

Salesforce Integration

A very valuable tool that all email tracking tools should have is integration with your CRM of choice, in this case, Salesforce.

Through this integration, you can automatically sync daily activity to Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity records, making your Gmail workflow blend seamlessly into your customer relationship management pipeline.

Pricing: Yesware has a free-forever plan including the basic ability to track emails and attachments, a meeting scheduler, 10 campaign recipients/mo, and basic email support. Their paid plans start at $19/mo/user and include unlimited email open, link, and attachment tracking, personal activity and recipient engagement reports, and email & phone support.

While Saleshandy isn’t directly designed to be an email tracking software, it does have that functionality and it does it well.

Saleshandy is a cold email outreach software that integrates with Gmail to provide all the email tracking and email analytics that dedicated Gmail email analytics tools would have.

Using Saleshandy, you can track responses, read receipts, click-through rates, and more; whatever statistics are important for you to generate leads.

Features:

Email Tracking

You’re going to see a lot of repetition in this list when it comes to what each tool does in terms of email tracking, but I’ll repeat it just to be clear.

You can easily track when (and how many times) recipients click and reply to your emails and analyze that email history to gauge your recipient’s interest level. From there, you can interpret those buyer signals to amp up your marketing efforts or simmer down if the customer isn’t engaging like you want them to.

Email Deliverability

To make sure your emails actually end up in the inboxes you want them to, Saleshandy has several tools to bolster your email deliverability.

First, they have a real-time writing assistant that grades your email’s content based on length, personalization, links, and, most importantly for your deliverability, spamminess. You don’t want to end up in the spam folder, and Saleshandy makes sure that happens as little as possible.

Saleshandy also has an email warm-up feature that gradually improves your domain reputation with a unique algorithm to reach better deliverability in a shorter time period than other tools.

Gmail Extension

While the app itself is a paid tool, they also offer a free Chrome extension for email tracking without any hidden signatures, logos, or gimmicks. With this, you can track emails in real-time, take advantage of email scheduling, create smart email templates and sequences, utilize mail merge, and much more.

Pricing: Saleshandy’s Chrome extension is 100% free forever. As for the app, Saleshandy offers users a 7-day free trial to test out the platform, and their paid plans start at $9/mo/user including full engagement tracking, unlimited email templates, Gmail/Outlook integration (of course), basic mail merge, and team activity tracking.

Email Meter is a complete email analytics suite for Gmail and Outlook, and gives users immediate insight into their Outlook email analytics once they get started.

There’s no set-up process; once you have it, it immediately gets to work and gives you actionable insights into your Gmail inbox activity.

Many of the companies who have discussed their experience with Email Meter note significant decreases in response times and reductions in the number of emails sent outside of work hours. On their website, they note 24% fewer emails sent & received, 30% response time improvement, 23% less likely to burn out, and a whopping 3 hours saved each week per employee.

Features:

Email Tracking

Email Meter’s email tracker gives you insight into pretty much every metric you could want to see.

You can even customize your dashboard with a variety of pre-made templates or, if none of those fit your needs, you can create your own entirely custom dashboard with whatever stats are relevant to you.

Team Member Inbox Sync

Another nice feature of Email Meter is the ability to connect with your team members’ inboxes and get data from all inboxes at whatever company you work with, and make changes accordingly.

This makes team collaboration a breeze simply by pooling all of your data, but it can be read separately if there is an issue specific to a single person’s inbox.

Ease of Use

When you start with Email Meter it’ll ask you a few questions, like your job role, company size, whether or not this is for personal or work use; simple questions like that.

After you’re done with that short survey, it’ll take a bit to sift through all the emails you’ve sent and you’re done. You now have access to the Email Meter dashboard, and it is incredibly simple and intuitive.

It’ll sort your inbox based on how many emails are sent and received by each email address, how long it takes you to respond on average, busiest hours, and much more. You can customize the dashboard to fit your needs, and can even export it as CSV.

Pricing: Email Meter has a free plan which gives you general email analytics and weekly/monthly reports. They do offer a 14-day free trial for their paid plans, which start at $19/mo and include custom date ranges, 2 years of email analytics, advanced filters, alerts & goals, and much more.