Get Notified When Someone Opens a Email – Signals

Ever wonder if someone has opened an important email you’ve sent them? According to HubSpot, their new Chrome app called Signals will let you know if a message has been opened and a good bit more. You have to use Gmail or Outlook to receive the notifications. Signals interfaces with Salesforce and the HubSpot marketing platform as well.

According to the HubSpot blog page announcing the release:

“Signals is a notification app that helps you know when and how to engage your leads. It lives in Google Chrome, and connects to many of the other tools that salespeople use on a daily basis. Signals shows you real-time notifications based on “signals” coming from emails you’ve sent, your website, your CRM system, even social media.”

We installed the app in a Google Chrome browser running on a Mac Pro to see
how it performed. The app connected easily to a Gmail account and allowed us to
select which messages we wanted to track before sending them. We tested it by
sending messages to associates, as well as to several other email accounts we set
up for testing. We made sure all the messages we sent were to people who were in the Gmail account’s Contacts. My insights derived from testing this app are as follows:
While we did get a number of response notifications regarding the messages that
were sent, we found the response data was not always reliable. Sometimes it did
not notify us when a message was opened. Also, if we sent a message to multiple
recipients, the notification ID’d it as an “Unidentified Contact” but did list the subject
of the message. The most reliable statistic is when a recipient clicks on a link in a
message. Signals was very reliable about letting us know what link was clicked on
and by whom.

We don’t currently use Salesforce or HubSport, so couldn’t test those. The messages we sent were opened on different email clients by people using a variety of browsers and internet service providers. We could have spent hours figuring out exactly which setups worked and why, but suffice it to say the results were mixed. We will keep testing Signals for now and hope they get the kinks out. After all, the notifications we’re receiving are better than no notifications at all, which is what most individuals have.