For customers', prospects', leads' using Google (free or Workspace) email accounts, Google is now detecting hidden images (clear pixels). If images are hidden you're marked as a trouble maker. Big time!

As illustrated above, all email open rate tracking software uses a 1x1 transparent HTML pixel sent in the email -- at the bottom of the message. Whether a human or a machine opened it, when that image is loaded, it reports a positive "open" tracking from the email sending platform.

If it's a human open, great. If it's a machine scan open, bad. That's a false positive and average false positive rates are around 40%!

However, focus on the bigger issue here. See that big "Report Spam" button? 

Does that REALLY prominent position of the "Report as Spam" button increase the amount of people who click it by 3 on 1,000 recipients?

"If you said yes, you agree with me," says Jesse Ouellette, who is an email deliverability expert claiming your email open rate goal for sales outreach emails should be zero.

Zero.

Stay with me. I'll explain why, what to do instead and present three reasons NOT to use email open rate tracking for cold email outreach.

Replies are all that matter

First of all, “Your email open rates are lying,” says Mr. Ouellette who reminds us -- email deliverability is the number one performance lever for cold email outreach.

This makes email open rate functionally useless. 

Replies are the only measurement that is important, says Scott Feldman of SAS.

"I don't care how you sent 1,000 emails this week -- how many replied?" he asks.

He tells a story of a gent he worked with... "who sent 10 emails per week. And always had a 40 or 50% reply rate. Why? Because he sent plain text emails -- only to prospects in his ICP.

Guess what? He sent relevant provocations with a pull strategy. Never asked for a meeting from cold. He was a top performer, and went to club every year.

I have spent my life in email marketing, and the tech that powers it. Vanity metrics are a joke - and yet people still gravitate to them (opens, clicks,) mean nothing," says Scott.

Jesse Ouellette provides 3 solid reasons sellers should avoid using open tracking for cold email outreach.

Open tracking disallows plain text

Getting into inboxes is crucial for sellers since the goal is to increase chances of engagement. Plain text sales outreach emails get superior deliverability. Open tracking software cannot be used in plain text emails.

Plain text emails contain only text without any HTML elements like images, graphics, or styled text. Because of this simplicity, they are less likely to trigger spam filters. Spam filters are designed to flag emails with characteristics found in promotional or spam content, such as excessive use of images, links, or embedded tracking codes.

Email providers like Gmail push incoming emails into tabs like "Primary," "Promotions," and "Social." HTML emails, especially those with rich formatting, images, and multiple links, are often classified under the "Promotions" tab. This is because they resemble marketing emails in structure and content.

Plain text emails appear more personal and direct, akin to one-on-one communication. This personal feel increases the likelihood that they will be placed in the Primary inbox, where they are more likely to be seen and read.

False positives

Open tracking is highly inconsistent. Each sales engagement/sending tool identifies "opens" differently, says Mr. Ouellette, "and ultimately can't prove someone opened the email. Every sequencer has a different way of tracking it. "

Result: A lot of false positives. You believe emails are being opened when they're not. Worse, we tend to make decisions based on these false signals.

That's the reason we track opens, after all!

Most tools don't have "Adjusted Open Rate." This metric is able to exclude all people with iPhones, who don't want to be tracked... presenting a more accurate open rate number. Not using Adjusted Open Rate puts you at risk for increasingly inaccurate measurements.

Given all the variables, open tracking cannot consistently prove a human being opened an email. It can only provide an estimate based on behavior of the tracking pixel. Open tracking gives a general sense of engagement. It's not an exact science. 

Differences in email clients, platform implementations, and privacy measures all contribute to false positives.

Email Fingerprints

Open tracking software provides a "fingerprint for your domain reputation," says Mr. Ouellette. It's shared amongst everyone using the sending sequencer (automation tool) most companies, sales reps or business owners use.

“Instead of blocking SDRs with the high complaint rate... Google (and the ESPs) will block your WHOLE company. Instead of Spam Jail for your SDR only, it's now Spam Jail for every single employee and email system in your company," he says.

This means one sloppy sales development rep could put your entire company over the limit. 

Speaking of -- Google requires less than 3 manual spam reports in every 1,000 emails you send. It's been this way for a while now!

If an organization has an abuse complaint rate of 0.3% or higher, Google (Yahoo is expected to follow) is blocking all messages coming from that sender.

Worth noting: It doesn't matter if you send 5k per day. Let's say you send 500 or 1k. You still have to keep your overall reported as spam rate below 0.3%.

The devil is in the details -- whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, sales rep or business development rep. 

HTML is a security risk

Secure email gateways open emails for users to protect their privacy. Mr. Ouellette recently noted how information security budgets are increasing significantly among businesses, "and will continue to go up."

Most of these systems will put your email in spam because of open tracking. Again, witness Google Workspace's big, intrusive banner above!

On the individual user side, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection function preloads images in emails regardless of whether the user actually opens the email or not. Yup. False positives galore! This security precaution causes tracking pixels to be triggered without the recipient opening the email.

This results in inflated (false) open rates.

Plus, Mr. Ouellette mentions, all of the open tracker tools share the exact same IP addresses across their customers/users.

"This makes it incredibly easy to block everyone using a particular tool. Another reason you don't want to use open tracking. It's almost a guaranteed spam hit against you," says Mr. Ouellette.

But I want to track, damnit!

You have two good options which are both do-able together.

1. Track activity with landing pages and/or
2. Start sending hyper-short, provocative text emails which take calculated risks.

First, Mr. Ouellette recommends people go forward by tracking activity, "server side with your own landing pages." Send people to your web server (or third party landing page tool) and track activity using the web page toolset.

(Rather than the email tool which is under attack.)

This is how Mr. Ouellette recommends you go forward.

"You need to own the code to use open tracking now. It's really link tracking, not open tracking that works. But it can't come from the link you include inside the email. You have to get the landing page hit first then figure out who it is from that mark using a server side page," he says.

He says to, "setup a landing page with Segment on it and identify with the anonymous user ID.

Capture what you need, then push it to match against what you sent the user.

You can track a lot more too... time spent and a lot of other metrics associated with it. Plus if you're good you can use the right tools on the other side to get things inside pixels on marketing platforms."

The other option is boldly taking calculated risks -- provoke curiosity in potential customers using a technique I explain in this short Curiosity Crash Course.

Bottom line -- plain text emails get delivered more often because of their simplicity and alignment with what email service providers expect from legitimate, personal communication.

Plain text avoids pitfalls associated with HTML emails, such as triggering spam filters, being classified under promotional tabs, and compatibility issues.

For sales outreach, where the goal is to build a personal connection with the recipient, plain text emails offer a straightforward and effective way to ensure that messages land directly in the inbox and are read by the intended audience.

Secure email gateways

A good few experts claim teams of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) sending emails individually is completely dead. This is because Google and Microsoft have brilliant engineers and Secure Email Gateways (Mimecast, Proofpoint, Cisco) are even more focused on blocking inbound email from unknown entities/senders.

"I'm sorry, the Gurus of SDR Prospecting might tell you differently, but they won't crack open their Salesloft account and show you how poorly they're doing," says Mr. Ouellette who studies companies like Outlook.io, Salesloft and the like.

Salesloft, for example, has not updated their Email Delivery guidance page to say 50 max per day of sending to Google servers. (it currently says 250)

"I've made at least 9-10 posts about Salesloft's best practices praying they will change it so they don't tank anyone's deliverability but they won't. They just want you to keep sending crap to people. 250 a day!" says Mr. Ouellette.

A new startup adopts technology like this and they end up just ruining the entire company domain. You should be ashamed of yourself as a vendor selling automation like this," says Mr. Ouellette who claims SEGs are spell the end of bad cold emailers.

Bottom line -- "These Security Email Gateways are going to crush your organizations terrible email practices. You will not get a single email through some of these systems if you aren't building healthy practices in this department," he says.

Over to you. See you in comments!