Introduction

When you are talking to multiple people in a prospective company, you are not sure about who should you engage to close the deal.

Buyer Signals can fix this problem for Sales teams. Buyer Signals will identify when an email is opened, a link is clicked and how many replies an email has received. We quantify a score to for each interaction at the email level so you can qualify contacts and engage with the most active contacts to close your deal.

Buyer Signals Overview

• How Buyer Signals Work

  • Sending Tracked Emails
  • How to use Link Tracking

  • How to Track Replies

  • Malicious / Dangerous link detection (COMING IN JUNE 2025)

• Viewing Buyer Signals

  • Sidebar People Tab

  • Sidebar Signals Tab (COMING IN JUNE 2025)

  • Signals Dashboard (COMING IN JUNE 2025)

• Best Practices for Accurate Tracking

• Frequently Asked Questions

What Are Buyer Signals?

When you're engaging multiple people at a prospective company, it can be challenging to know who’s paying attention—and where to focus your follow-up. Buyer Signals help you identify the most engaged prospects by tracking email opens, link clicks, and replies at the email level.

Each tracked email receives a Buyer Signal Score for each signal, based on how recipients interact with it. This score helps you prioritize high-engagement emails and take action accordingly.

How Buyer Signals Work

Whenever you send a tracked email to a prospect, Cirrus Insight monitors engagement across three types of activity:

• Email opens

• Link clicks

• Replies

These events are totaled up for each signal and displayed at the email level over a rolling 90-day period in the dashboard.

📌 The score reflects per-signal activity on an email. This allows you to gauge how your message performed with the entire group of recipients.

Sending Tracked Emails

To enable Buyer Signals:

1. Open a new Compose window.

2. Add your desired recipients.

3. In the sidebar, make sure to check:

   • ✅ Track email opens

   • ✅ Track link clicks

Hint: To ensure you never forget to track an email, you can enable Track email opens by default in your sidebar and Buyer Signal dashboard settings.

How to use Track link clicks (New experience coming June 2025)

Gmail:

1. When enabling link tracking in Gmail, Cirrus automatically converts the links into our tracking links so we can report on clicks, this means you do not have to do anything other than inserting your links into text and clicking Send!
   
   When you enable Track link clicks remember that URLs need to be hyperlinked into some text within the email. Bare links cannot be tracked.

2. Once ready, click Send. Link Click tracking starts immediately.

Outlook: 

1. When using Outlook and enabling opens and/or link click tracking, you will be presented with an Update Tracking button. When clicked it will update the email in the background so that we can track opens and link clicks. 

   1. The reason for this is due to a technical limitation of Outlook. 

2. If you make changes to your email, such as updating or adding new hyperlinks, the Update Tracking button becomes available and needs to be clicked in order to capture the changes prior to sending.  

3. Once ready, click Send. Link Click tracking starts immediately.

🆕 Malicious / Dangerous link detection

1. When sending an email with link tracking enabled, Cirrus will check databases for known malicious links and present a warning to the sender. 
2. The sender has a chance to fix the link, but can still send the email with the suspicious link if they choose. The recipient will be met with a warning page when opening the link. 
3. The suspicious link will not be tracked by our system. 

How to Track Replies (While composing)

1. While composing an email, check the Track Replies checkbox
2. A set of fields will appear below allowing you to configure when to be alerted if no response is received. 
3. Once you've set your preferences and send the email, Buyer Signals will automatically detect and count replies to the email that you tracked. 

How to Track Replies (After sending)

1. If you forgot to enable Reply Tracking when composing, you can still enable it from your sent folder.
2. With your sidebar open, go to your sent folder and find the email you'd like to track.
3. The sidebar will display a Track Replies button that will reveal the same fields as noted above. 
4. Configure your preferences and click Apply at the bottom right. 

Hint: To ensure you never forget to turn on Reply Tracking when composing, you can enable Track Replies by default in your sidebar and Buyer Signal dashboard settings.

Learn more about how to use Reply Tracking and Reminders.

Viewing Buyer Signals

Sidebar People Tab:

After sending a tracked email:

• Open the email from your Sent folder, or if you received a response, click the email you sent in the thread.

• The People tab of the sidebar will display:

  • Counts for Opens, Clicks and Replies for any signal you enabled when composing your email: 

• A timeline of activity including:

  • When the email was opened (with timestamps)

  • Which links were clicked

  • How many replies were received

Bar charts for Opens, Clicks, and Replies:

🆕 Sidebar Signals Tab:

1. The Signals tab of the sidebar will display a summary of sent emails for the past 7 days without the need to select any email. The Signals tab shows:
   1. Filter that displays:  
      1. Total Sends
      2. Percentage of sent emails that were opened and replied to
      3. Percentage of sent emails that had a link clicked
   2. Count of each signal per sent email

This real-time feedback lets you identify which emails are driving the most engagement—so you can follow up with the right prospects at the right time.

🆕 Signals Dashboard:

To support aggregated signal data in a longer timeline view, we built an entirely new Buyer Signal dashboard that shows up to 90 days of signal history. It is a larger and more functional version of the Signals tab of the sidebar.  

• The Signals Dashboard will display all the same details as the Signals tab of the sidebar plus:

  • Displaying all signals in the graph instead of per signal

  • View options for This week, Last 2 weeks, Last 30 days, and Last 90 days

• • Location of last detected open
  • Last Opened 
  • Sortable columns
  • Search

Best Practices for Accurate Tracking

• If you are regularly emailing organizations that use Gmail as their email provider, a Google admin can add cirrusinsight.com/ in the allow list so that the tracking pixel bypasses the Google image proxy, the forward slash / is required. This will allow for more accurate open counts. Specific steps on doing this can be found here.

   

• If you see little to no activity for an email or unusual activity results, we've written this article article "Understanding Buyer Signals and the Factors that Impact Them" to detail the different variables that can affect signal accuracy. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Location Tracking:

• In the dashboard report does the location refer to the first person who opened the email or last open so far? 
  • The Location refers to the last person who opened the email. 

Need Help?

If you have questions about using Buyer Signals or tracking engagement in Cirrus Insight, contact our support team today.