What is email tracking in a CRM?

Email tracking is a CRM feature that records when a message you sent was opened, and which links in it were clicked. It works through two mechanisms, both invisible to the reader, and it produces two signals of very different quality.

How it works

The open signal comes from a tracking pixel: a transparent image, one pixel square, embedded in the message. When the recipient's mail client loads images, it requests that image from a server, and the request is recorded as an open.

The click signal comes from link rewriting. Every link in the message is replaced with one that routes through the sender's server, records the click, and forwards the reader to the real destination.

What an open actually means

An open means an image was loaded. That is less than it sounds, and it has been getting less since 2021.

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, introduced with iOS 15 in September 2021, pre-loads remote images for Apple Mail users whether or not the message is ever read. Every one of those registers as an open. Gmail routes images through a caching proxy, which changes what the recorded location and timing mean. And a message sitting in a preview pane can load its images without anybody looking at it.

Clicks are the stronger signal

A click needs a deliberate action, so it is much harder to trigger by accident. Automated security scanners do click links in some corporate environments, which inflates the number, but the distortion is smaller and more predictable than the one affecting opens.

What is fair to do with it

Do not use it to accuse anyone. "I can see you opened my email" reads as surveillance and costs you the deal more often than it recovers one. The information is for your planning, not for the conversation.

And do not read silence as tracked evidence. A contact who never replies may have read every message with images turned off, in which case your tracking shows nothing at all and the absence means nothing.

Consent, disclosure and the record

Tracking pixels are personal data processing in the EU and UK, because they record an individual's behaviour. What is required varies by jurisdiction and by whether the relationship is existing or cold, and this is worth checking properly rather than assuming.

The practical minimum: know that it is on, know who can see the data, and include tracking events in your retention rules rather than keeping them forever by default. Many teams do not know their CRM has it enabled, which is the worst version, because nobody made a decision.

This is a description of how tracking works, not legal advice. If you send cold email in a regulated market, have someone qualified check your setup.

Frequently asked questions

What is email tracking in a CRM?

It is a feature that records when a message you sent was opened and which of its links were clicked. Opens are detected with a small transparent image embedded in the message, and clicks by rewriting each link to pass through your own server first. Both happen without any visible change to the message the recipient sees.

How accurate is email open tracking?

Not very, and less so every year. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has pre-loaded images for Apple Mail users since September 2021 whether or not a message is read, and each of those counts as an open. Preview panes and image proxies add more. Opens overcount by an amount that varies with your audience's mail clients, so treat them as a relative trend rather than a count of readers.

Can someone tell if I opened their email?

Only if your mail client loaded the images, which many do by default. If images are blocked, or if you use a client that pre-loads everything, what the sender sees is either nothing or a false positive. So the answer is that a sender may see an open event, and that event is not reliable evidence that a person read the message.

Is email open tracking or click tracking more reliable?

Clicks, by a wide margin. A click requires a deliberate action, while an open only requires an image to load, which now happens automatically for a large share of recipients. Automated security scanners do click links in some corporate environments and inflate the figure, but that distortion is smaller and more predictable than the one affecting opens.

Is email tracking legal?

It is regulated rather than banned, and the rules differ by jurisdiction and by whether you have an existing relationship with the recipient. In the EU and UK a tracking pixel records an individual's behaviour and is treated as personal data processing. Check your own obligations properly rather than assuming, and at minimum know whether the feature is switched on in your CRM.

Should you tell recipients you track emails?

Disclosure in a privacy policy is the common practice and, in several jurisdictions, part of what is expected. Announcing it in the message itself is not usual and rarely helps. The rule that matters more in daily use is never quoting tracking data back to a person, because being told your open was recorded reads as surveillance regardless of what any policy says.