logged
I reported it as spam (and I'd do it again)
Just got a hilarious email from some service called MailProtect:
===
"Your email was successfully delivered, but your tracking pixels were detected and neutralized by MailProtect. If this email was unsolicited or automated, please remove the recipient from your mailing list."
===
So I reported it as spam.
And with good reason. Here's why:
First of all, I'm an email marketer.
Which means, by default, my emails have tracking pixels in them.
A tracking pixel is basically a tiny, invisible 1x1 image embedded at the bottom of every email. When it loads in your inbox, it tells my email platform the email was opened.
Pretty low-tech stuff, honestly.
But here's what most people don't realize…
Open tracking is notoriously unreliable. Apple Mail either blocks it outright or fires off false opens just to mess with everybody. Privacy browsers do the same. I've had readers reply to emails my ESP swears they never opened.
So the idea that I'm sitting here, creepily monitoring whether you specifically opened my last email?
That’s not how this works.
What I'm actually looking at is the bigger picture.
How many people opened this email versus that one? Which subject lines get the right people clicking through? Which offers land?
That's what teaches me to write better subject lines, better emails, better offers.
And here's what's interesting about that…
People who know what they’re doing with email aren’t looking for the “biggest open rates”. No, what they’re looking for is often more subtle, and more nuanced. Fewer opens with a higher click-through rate tells you something huge open rates won’t.
Or they’re looking for something more glaringly obvious which is impossible to hide (can you guess what that thing is?)
All to say… I’d rather have 500 people who care open my emails than 2,000 people who don’t.
In other words, email tracking is not surveillance, it’s feedback, like body language, on how your message is landing. But that’s not all… there’s ANOTHER reason I reported MailProtect to my spam folder.
Why? Because they told me to “remove the recipient from my mailing list” without telling me who that recipient is.
Which is kind of a spectacular bug if you think about it…
(And honestly, a bit of an impossible puzzle to solve because the whole privacy pitch collapses the second they reveal who it is.)
The funny thing is, whoever this person is opted in to get daily emails about email marketing from an email marketer, and somewhere along they way they also signed up for a service that fires anonymous privacy notices at email marketers on their behalf.
And the solution they propose is for me to remove… someone.
…I have no idea who.
So into the spam folder it goes. Problem solved.
Anyway.
This whole thing reminded me of a quote I came across recently attributed to John Wanamaker, the department store pioneer from the 1800s, you may have heard it:
===
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half."
===
I had a conversation with a potential client recently. They were out there marketing on three or four different platforms, working quite hard at it.
And when I asked which ones were working best, they said they didn't know.
That's the first part of the problem, right there.
And I see it all too often… if you're not tracking what's working in your marketing, even at a basic level, you're not marketing.
You're just guessing.
And yeah, nobody wants someone creepily cataloging their every click.
But as a marketer, and if you ask anyone else who takes marketing seriously, the data we actually care about is the stuff that tells me how to show up better for everyone, not the stuff that tells me what you had for dinner last night.
So if you want to build a simple system that tells you what to write, when to post, who it's for, and how to know if it's working…
Start with Threads Organic Traffic, it’s what my whole marketing philosophy is built upon.
Here's the link:
Your pal,
Kevin Hood