Custom Email Tracking in Laravel

Emails are great way to send targeted messages to Users. While Laravel provides foundational emailing capabilities, it may lack in-built functionalities for tracking email interactions such as open rates. Custom email tracking in Laravel bridges this gap, offering insights into when and how often emails are accessed. This article explains the process of constructing a custom solution for email tracking in Laravel to deepen your understanding of email engagements.

Prerequisites:

• A functioning Laravel setup

• Basic comprehension of Laravel’s mail and queue functionalities

• An operational mail server

Step 1: Creating the Tracking Mechanism for email tracking resides in embedding a 1x1 pixel transparent image within the email body. When the recipient opens the email, the image loads, initiating a request to your server which is then logged as an 'open' event.

public function build()
{
    $trackingUrl = route('email.track', ['email' => $this->email->id]);
    $trackingPixel = "<img src='{$trackingUrl}' width='1' height='1' />";

    return $this->view('emails.your-email-view')
                ->with('trackingPixel', $trackingPixel);
}

Step 2: Setting up the Route and Controller for handling email tracking

// Route
Route::get('email/track/{email}', 'EmailTrackingController@track')->name('email.track');

// Controller
public function track(Request $request, Email $email)
{
    $email->opens()->create(['ip' => $request->ip()]);
    return response()->file(public_path('images/transparent.png'));
}

Ensure you have a transparent 1x1 pixel image named transparent.png in your public images directory.

Step 3: Logging Email Open Events

Generate a model and migration for logging email opens. Each record will represent an "open" event for a specific email.

php artisan make:model Open -m

In the generated migration:

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('opens', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->id();
        $table->foreignId('email_id')->constrained()->cascadeOnDelete();
        $table->ipAddress('ip');
        $table->timestamps();
    });
}

Step 4: Defining Relationships Define a relationship between your Email and Open models to associate each email with its corresponding open events.

// In your Email model
public function opens()
{
    return $this->hasMany(Open::class);
}

Step 5: As the email open, data is recorded and then you can now examine this information to gain useful insights, like finding out the open rate of your emails.

$openRate = $email->opens->count() / $totalSentEmails * 100;

Creating a custom email tracking in Laravel helps you understand email interactions better, setting a base for data-focused email campaigns. This guide gives you a strong email tracking setup in Laravel, pushing you towards smarter and more effective email chats. As you explore more into email tracking analytics, you'll discover a lot of data that can greatly improve your email marketing approaches.