Email Tracking is Dead

The #1 Marketing Email Tracking Secret

What marketing automation providers (and, if they understand the technology, your Marketing team) don’t want you to know, is that email tracking has been a hack since day one—and tracking data has been largely unreliable for as long as there have been attempts to collect it.

Efforts by Apple and others in recent years, in response to greater scrutiny against user privacy violations, have simply further obfuscated or confused these hacks in ways to make the data they provide even more meaningless.

Email Stats You Can Trust

Hacks aside, not all email send and receipt statistics are bogus. If you have a competent and scrupulous Marketing team, they have probably already helped you understand which metrics are empirical, which are generally accurate, which can be used for general guidance, and which should be ignored.

The Golden Metric: Conversion

That’s right—as with advertising, scrutinized conversion numbers and data are the best gauges of email success.


This article is a stub that I plan to expand over time.


Notes