Should you track opens on cold email?

Open tracking costs you some deliverability and tells you less than it used to. When it's worth it, and when to leave it off.

Open tracking works by adding a tiny image to the email. When the image loads, the email counts as opened. That sounds harmless, but it has two costs.

The costs

• It turns your email into HTML. A plain-text email from one person to another is what a real cold email looks like. Adding an HTML part and a remote image moves it closer to what bulk marketing looks like.
• The numbers are noisy. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images for many recipients whether they read the email or not, and corporate security scanners fetch images and links before a human sees them. Open rates read higher than reality, and click counts include bots.

When it's worth it

Tracking can still help when you are testing subject lines on a large list and want a rough comparison, or when you need to know a link was clicked at all. If you turn it on, use your own tracking domain so links point at your brand, not a shared domain that other senders also use.

What to measure instead

Replies are the only number that doesn't lie. Positive replies and meetings booked tell you whether the list, the offer and the copy work. In Inboxed tracking is off by default, can be turned on per campaign, and runs on a tracking domain you set in Settings.

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