Over the past few years email tracking has become huge in sales & marketing.
While marketers have used it via their Marketing Automation systems for almost a decade, millions of sales reps have been using it directly in Gmail/Outlook. Inside sales/SDR tools also include this feature.
After all, everyone wants to know if their email was read, how many times it was read, etc. so that you can actively serve those prospects/clients.
Life was good till the hackers showed up and the email providers (Microsoft, Google, Anti-spam services) decided to do more to protect clients. Here are 4 reasons why should stop tracking emails.
1 – It’s sending your emails to the spam folder.
Every trackable email includes invisible pixels or trackable URLs which directly increase the spam score of an email. I’ll explain the technical details in another post but if your email contains these long, funny URLs from a domain (the tracking service) different from your company domain, your spam score just went.
2 – The big one – it’s screwing up your metrics
Here’s the big one – an increasing number of false positives. More and more email protection services (software that scans an email before it reaches your Inbox) load these tracking pixels before the message is delivered to the recipient. So the sender might think the message was opened but it wasn’t opened by a human – it was the email service that “opened” it.
3 – It’s going to get worse
A new capability in Microsoft Office 365 (which has >70% enterprise market share) “clicks” on the links in an email message to test if it is an unsafe URL before the message is delivered. This artificially inflates click metrics. Marketing campaigns look like they are performing very well and SDRs might think prospects are very engaged but the reality might be very different.
4 – Just in case you do care about GDPR
Now there’s one more thing (email interaction data) to worry about and make sure your email tracking provider has a way for you to be compliant.
A quick test that you can run on your own if you use an email automation (marketing automation or inside sales automation tool) to see if your metrics are getting impacted is to test the timestamps on emails sent and clicks coming from the same target company. If you see several people from the same domain “click” on your emails at exactly the same time, most likely it was their email protection service and not real humans. And if
So what to do if you want to measure engagement without link tracking?
Use Google Analytics. That’s what we do as we’ve found that to be the most reliable way. I’ll explain in another post how we do it.
Email tracking is not free, it comes at a steep cost – either by sending your messages to spam or mis-reporting and giving you a false sense of email engagement.