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Identify Email Recipients - Know Who's Clicking Your Emails

Written by Frencheska Peren

Snitcher can identify visitors who click links in your outbound and marketing emails. No form submission needed.

Just add a small tracking parameter to your email links, and when someone clicks through to your website, Snitcher captures their email and links it to their browsing session.

This is a great way to significantly increase the number of identified visitors on your site 👇

What Does It Actually Show You?

Without email link tracking, a visitor who clicks through from your email campaign might show up as an anonymous visitor ID, especially if they're browsing from their phone, at home or using a privacy-focused email app.

With email link tracking enabled, that same visitor shows up with their email address in Snitcher. From there, you can easily identify who they are and which company they belong to.

💡 This does not consume any contact credits. Email link tracking is included with your Snitcher subscription. It simply identifies the visitor using the email parameter in the link.

How It Works?

It's pretty simple. You add a special parameter to the links in your emails that contains the recipient's email address.

When they click through:

  1. Snitcher reads the email parameter from the URL

  2. The visitor is immediately identified

  3. All their activity is linked to their email address

  4. The parameter is automatically removed from the URL (so your links stay clean)

And here's where it gets powerful, Snitcher links this identification retroactively. So if that person visited your site before as an anonymous visitor, those past sessions get linked to their profile too.

Two Ways to Pass the Email

Snitcher supports two methods:

👉 Plain email (sn_email) - pass the email address directly in the URL. Simple to set up, easy to debug. The email is visible in the URL in these cases.

https://yoursite.com/pricing?sn_email=sarah@acme.com

👉 Base64 encoded (sn_eid) - encode the email for better privacy. The email is hidden in the URL, which is recommended for most use cases.

https://yoursite.com/pricing?sn_eid=c2FyYWhAYWNtZS5jb20=

💡 Use Base64 encoding when you want to avoid exposing email addresses in browser history and server logs.

Platform-Specific Setup

Here's where to find the exact setup instructions for the email tool you're using. Each one shows you how to add the Snitcher parameter to your email templates 👇

💡 Using a different tool? You can add the parameter manually to any email platform. Full instructions are in our developer docs.

What It Doesn't Do?

A few things worth knowing:

  • Email link tracking identifies visitors based on the email in the link parameter. If someone forwards your email and the other person clicks the link, Snitcher will attribute that visit to the original recipient's email, not the person who actually clicked. So it's not 100% accurate in every scenario, but in practice this is rare.

  • This only works for emails you send directly to recipients. Never use email link tracking in public links, social media posts or shared documents.

  • The Snitcher tracker needs to be installed on the page the link points to. If the tracker isn't on the landing page, identification won't work.

Best Practices

👉 Combine Snitcher's sn_email parameter with your existing UTM parameters. Snitcher tells you who clicked, UTMs tell you what they clicked and where it came from.

👉 Always test your links before launching a campaign. Click a test link and verify the visitor shows up as identified in Snitcher.

👉 You can also pass additional traits like first name, company and job title using sn_trait_ parameters. Check the developer docs for the full list.

For the full technical documentation, check out our developer docs.

As always, feel free to drop us a message if you'd like to talk ideas, need some help or would just like to say hello. Team Snitcher signing off 👋

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