• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 19, 2017

Does your company track your marketing emails? If not, it’s one of the few firms that doesn’t. A report by One More Company (OMC) states that almost all bulk emails are tracked. And OMC is trying to stop it — by tagging tracked emails and cutting off tracking devices. 

Silly me — I called thinking this was a service for marketers. In fact, it’s largely for consumers (and the trackers themselves).  

What’s tracking? It’s the method by which you monitor email delivery to the recipient, OMC states. But it’s so much more than that. The person using the tracking can find out “what kind of device you’re using, your operating system. or apps,” and other information, said Florian Seroussi, CEO of OMC.This can be shared with marketers, competitors and anybody.

And it’s not just companies doing it. “There’s more and more people-to-people tracking, and we don’t think it’s a good thing,” Seroussi said.

For this report, OMC studied over 1.5 billion client emails sent since July 2015. And Ii found that 40.6% of all email now contains tracking.

Of all the email sent, 31% is conversational — people-to-people. This includes friends emailing each other, emails that are part of the sales process, and any one-on-one messages.

Of these emails, 16% have been tracked in 2017, compared with 10% in 2015. In addition, OMC reports that 45% of conversational emails contain a signature.

It’s easy to track emails — just use one of the many services that exist. “There are so many tools available,” Just plug into Gmail, and you’ll get an opening receipt every time you send an email,” Seroussi said.

The top tracking software, listed in order by OMC, includes Sidekick, Streak, Mailtrack, Yesware, Mixmax 
and SalesforceIQ. Some services are free, others cost money, SalesforceIQ being at the high end, Seroussi stated.

Now we get to the marketing part. The remaining 69% of email, constituting 85% of what consumers receive, is bulk email — newsletters, marketing emails, transactions and notifications. And 99% of these are tracked.

Seroussi acknowledged that “most marketers have an ethical code: they track not just for marketing reasons but making sure you got the email.” But he questions the tracking by Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

“They know everything about you,” he said. “Why do they need to track emails as well? They’re not selling you anything. They’re selling advertising to third parties.”

The report lists the top trackers — or “offenders,” as Seroussi put it — as Mailchimp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Amazon. 

“If Amazon sends you and email at noon, and you open it, they’ll send you additional emails timed by the opening," Serouissi charged. "But they won’t if you’ve never triggered it by opening the inbox.”

OMC offers an email intelligence solution called Sende.rs that removes trackers. “If you get a cold email, you can find out who’s sending it,”  Seroussi said. We add it in the footer of email.” It also stops the tracker.

Marketers, beware. But Seroussi added that the trackers themselves are among the most avid users of Send.rs. “They know about tracking, and they don’t want to be tracked,” Seroussi laughed.

Any other useful findings? Sure. OMC reports that personal accounts receive an average of 11 emails per day. Work accounts get 80.

The busiest days of the week for email are Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they are equal in volume. The slowest days of the year are Christmas and New Year’s Day.