Introduction

Email opens have been a part of the sales tech stack for as long as outbound has existed as a GTM channel. Perhaps longer actually.

But how does it work? Are email opens still valuable in 2024? And if so, what can we really glean from the data it generates?

Well, that’s what we’ll be diving into in this article.

The Technical Breakdown

Email tracking isn’t really that complicated. When a sender chooses to track an email, the platform they’re sending it from embeds a 1x1 pixel image into the message. This image is unique to the email they’re sending.

When the email is opened, the recipients mailbox requests the image from the senders server. This request is logged and is shown to the sender as an indication that the email has been opened.

This kind of technology is incredibly widespread. More than you might think - over 60% of emails received contain some form of tracking pixel. On average, users receive 24 emails a day that attempt to flag an open.

Most of these emails are of course, marketing emails. But sales emails sent via Hubspot or Gong contain the exact same type of trackers.

How Reliable Are These Metrics?

The short answer: so-so. It really depends on how much you’re relying on this type of data.

Whilst the tracking pixel is a sure sign of delivery it doesn’t always guarantee that your email has actually been opened. And there’s a couple of reasons for that.

Whilst inboxes have evolved over the years, tracking pixels have not. Modern email clients like Gmail and Apple Mail prioritise a speedy reading experience. And to do that, they preload emails in the inbox so that when you click on them they’re ready instantly.

The pixel isn’t flagged when the email is opened, just when it’s downloaded. This is often why you see 3 or 4+ opens per email in your CRM - not because your email was so wonderfully written that they’re re-reading it (sadly), but because the recipients email inbox is reloading it.

Tracking pixels are also flagged when your email is scanned for spam. Just like when an email is preloaded, email clients load everything in the message so that it can be properly evaluated for spam, scams, phishing or something else.

Email Protections

Many email clients are also cracking down on these types of practices.

Tracking pixels were - for many years - able to track the location of who has opened an email. In recent years, you might have seen more of the below:

Google has begun anonymising the location of these opens by downloading images via a proxy server in California. There are ways to bypass this but it’s a worrying sign for the future of email tracking.

In fact, some email clients have begun to outright block these types of technologies. Hey (from the guys behind Basecamp) and Superhuman now block remote image loading by default. This kills email tracking outright. It’s impossible to see whether or not your email has been opened if the image isn’t loaded.

All of this is overshadowed by some of the sweeping regulatory changes being made by privacy bodies. In 2023, an Austrian Data Protection Authority ruled that the Facebook tracking pixel broke GDPR rules. Now, enforcement of this ruling is still a fair way off (not something I fancy getting into in this blog post) but it’s a worrying trend for anyone relying on pixel tracking as a way of figuring out intent.

The tl;dr version of this section is that there’s a lot of movement towards a privacy-first attitude to emails.

In fact, after writing this post Google released an update that blocked images on Gmail by default for new senders. Whilst this doesn't particularly matter if you've already contacted the recipient, it does signal intent to be more privacy conscious.

The Path Forward

This article is a roundabout way of saying that if you’re looking to measure intent in your sales, you can’t rely on the data you collect from an email. Mainly because it’s a weak sign of intent, but also because it’s incredibly unreliable.

But there are better ways of measuring intent. We built whomso around the idea that sellers couldn’t get a good sense of when prospects were actually engaged or if they were just tyre kicking. But we did so with privacy in mind.

Visits are anonymised and only identifiable via elimination i.e. because someone’s viewing the customised link you sent them, you can deduce that it’s probably the person you sent it to. We don’t store personally identifiable information because that means forcing a user to agree to cookies before they view your page.

Conclusion

Email open pixels still have a place in the tech stack - but perhaps not for sales. Because of the vague information they contain they’re far better suited to marketing. It’s a fair indication of email value, not whether or not a prospect is interested in buying your product.

And it’s a rapidly changing game too. Regulations are evolving fast and the best strategy is to play by the rules.