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Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe th

Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.

vageli 4y ago
Which services automatically unsubscribe you after a period of unopened emails? I can't imagine a marketing department ever adopting that practice.
- bberenberg 4y ago
  Here is an example: https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/stop-sending-emails-to-inactive-subscribers/ https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/stop-sending-emails-to-inactiv... But there are lots of incentives here, for example in HubSpot you pay per “marketing contact” which are people to whom you can send emails. If I flag someone as not a marketing contact, it saves me money.
JohnFen 4y ago
Surely blocking tracking pixels looks just like not opening the email, triggering the autounsubscribe. I don't see the problem here. The recipient and mailer both get what they want.
- bberenberg 4y ago
  Yes and no. If a sufficient % of users do this, then you're stuck with "I guess I gotta email them since I have no way to measure engagement". Also, keep in mind that without these pixels, a sender doesn't know what their open rate is. Open rate is a large metric of whether a sender is considered a spammer or not by Gmail and Microsoft. Without these pixels, senders have no way to benchmark their own behavior against the general ecosystem. It's like asking a runner to get better but not telling them their own mile time. Clearly there can be other solutions like if major email providers gave senders aggregate data on the open rate of emails they process for a given sender, but then you get back into the question around if this is tracking etc much like in this thread.

vageli 4y ago

Which services automatically unsubscribe you after a period of unopened emails? I can't imagine a marketing department ever adopting that practice.

bberenberg 4y ago
Here is an example: https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/stop-sending-emails-to-inactive-subscribers/ https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/stop-sending-emails-to-inactiv... But there are lots of incentives here, for example in HubSpot you pay per “marketing contact” which are people to whom you can send emails. If I flag someone as not a marketing contact, it saves me money.

JohnFen 4y ago

Surely blocking tracking pixels looks just like not opening the email, triggering the autounsubscribe. I don't see the problem here. The recipient and mailer both get what they want.

bberenberg 4y ago
Yes and no. If a sufficient % of users do this, then you're stuck with "I guess I gotta email them since I have no way to measure engagement". Also, keep in mind that without these pixels, a sender doesn't know what their open rate is. Open rate is a large metric of whether a sender is considered a spammer or not by Gmail and Microsoft. Without these pixels, senders have no way to benchmark their own behavior against the general ecosystem. It's like asking a runner to get better but not telling them their own mile time. Clearly there can be other solutions like if major email providers gave senders aggregate data on the open rate of emails they process for a given sender, but then you get back into the question around if this is tracking etc much like in this thread.