Do you have tracking ON or OFF in your marketing emails?
I am wondering if you have tracking ON or OFF in your marketing emails?
If ON is it a conscious decision, and if OFF what service are you using?
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I am wondering if you have tracking ON or OFF in your marketing emails?
If ON is it a conscious decision, and if OFF what service are you using?
We have disabled all email tracking for Plausible Analytics.
For all transactional emails we use Postmark and for subscribers to the blog posts we use MailChimp. They both allow us to disable open rates, click rates and similar tracking. So we know how many emails we send but don't see anything in terms of who opens them or who clicks them.
We're a privacy-friendly web analytics tool so we try to stay privacy-friendly in the way we run our startup and in the way we promote it too.
This makes total sense for you and what I will have to do for my app as its promoted as privacy-first and with the nature of the content I will be sharing I do not want to know who clicks what.
Do you have to turn it off for every email you send with Mailchimp? Or does it remember it from campaign to campaign?
Just do it once in the settings and no need to do it again. Would be great if there was a privacy-first email service that was private by default and minimized data collection overall while still giving some basic aggregate data. Kind of like Plausible is to Google Analytics :)
Yes it would be great!
Who will make it?!?!
Let's make it!
👀
Don't tempt me. I've already got too many ideas for new projects!
Thanks for chiming in folks.
I am neither totally for or against, I am just starting to question current practice.
I think what irks me with tracking is that it is captured on a per user level or not at all. For many of us it would be enough with an aggregated open/click rate to see how we are doing with our messaging.
Its something about the "user x open the email at x o'clock and clicked this link an hour later" that feels a little much.
Especially for an app like mine where I might share links to content about health related issues.
And for the services its either ON or OFF, not a "I would like aggregated tracking, but not tied to a user" approach like Fathom and Plausible are doing in the analytics space.
PS: I would love to see someone make a Fathom/Plusible privacy-first solution in the newsletter space.
What you point is a cause very close to my heart. I am self-hosting my newsletter exactly to avoid having trackers in place. Once in a while I remember my readers that I am not tracking them.
Open rates are almost impossible to have respecting the user privacy. Open rates really mean tracking when, how often, on what devices, a user checks their e-mail. It would come down to a service that tracks on a per-user bases but only displays aggregated data to the customers. Plus, e-mail providers that cache the contents (I believe this is what GMail does) and Hey blocking it, makes open-rates a skewed metric all together.
Click rates are, perhaps, easier to implement in a privacy-conscious way. Pretty much like bit.ly, that aggregates clicks without targeting individuals. This is something I tried a couple of times out of curiosity, but in any case I am not in the optimization world, so I can live without really knowing.
The private website analytics tools solves this by not saving the privat data, even though they have access to it. Such as IP addresses etc. if I have understood it correctly.
But as you said, for many of us its just noise and not the whole truth anyways.
Indeed, privacy friendly trackers boil down to trust. Closed-source ones such as Simple Analytics will never be an option for me. With emails, however, it seems easier to audit (loading external images, obfuscated links, etc)
I have it turned on. My logic being that I'm still small and probably don't understand my tagret audience completely yet. I'll take any advantage I can get to grow things at this stage.
It's all good and well turning it off when you already have a great understanding of your audience (and probably making decent money from them!) after plugging away for years. But when you're struggling to hit $1k MRR, I think it's fair to use everything at your disposal to improve your marketing emails.
I see your point, but could we get by without tracking on a per user basis? See reply to all.
Fair point, I do agree with you. I could get by with just an overall open rate and CTR. I can't think of a time where I utilized being able to see exactly who opened or clicked the email.
I would like that so much because then I could see "oh, people were interested in sensitive topic x", but not exactly who and what link they clicked.
Off course with a very small list aggregation would still not be private...though things this.
It's on for Indie Hackers. It was a passive decision at first, not a conscious one, because tracking defaults to on if you use ConvertKit. But it's a conscious decision for me to keep tracking on, almost entirely because I like to see how the open rates change over time, and we plan to do a bit of A/B testing, too.
But could we get by without tracking on a per user basis? See reply to all.
Blog authors or companies are trying to become Google of future by collecting numerous data by tracking. Newsletters are the first keys to open doors. Newsletter.ist allows you to follow any newsletter privately.
I have it 100% off. I am self-hosting my newsletter using Django.
💌
ON is the only option my providers, Revue and Gumroad (workflows), currently offer. Revue is working on options to turn off tracking altogether or provide some more privacy (e.g. anonymized metrics). I'll experiment with turning off tracking when it's available.
Privacy is good. But I don't see long lines of customers, credit with card in hand, eager to pay to support the creators of free content who can't get back anything in exchange, not even some data.
There is no marketing if you turn off your tracking. Marketing means measurement as well.
How do you know if you are going the right way if you don't know results?
I think there is nothing wrong with tracking emails, we all do it for our users sake. We want them to get certain informations and we want solve their problems. Emails helps with that.
I see your point, but could we get by without tracking on a per user basis? See reply to all.
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We have it ON for all our marketing emails, but OFF for all transactional emails in our SaaS app.
The only reason we have it on for marketing campaigns is to really see if our email was of interest to our audience. If we get lots of opens, then we know that we are on target with our message or content. Low opens mean we will can the campaign and try something else.
Seeing as we are usually in the 30%-40% open rate, I assume we are doing something right.
I absolutely abhor the nagging, incessant follow up emails that seem to be prevalent these days - the ones that repeatedly badger you for not replying or opening their emails. That earns a quick unsubscribe or curt reply from me. Our own emails are strictly 'one-shot' to ascertain interest levels and nothing past that.
On the flipside, I DO appreciate the emails from certain vendors or blogs etc. that say "You haven't opened our emails in a while, are you still interested in receiving them?". That is respectful and considerate of my time and their space in my Inbox and I usually respond favourably.
I feel you about the nagging, signed for a Drip trial and had to manually unsubscribe from all kinds of nagging as I was probably automatically signed up for several "lists".
I ended up making my first reply to you (now deleted) a kind of reply to all.
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Thanks you so much for pointing me towards Mailjet. I am located in Norway and it does make it simpler with compliance and it seems they might cover my app's needs in addition to turning off tracking at the account level.
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I think maybe you cannot turn it off with HubSpot. Another thought is by turing tracking off we have to be more creative in the way we solicit feedback from our users. And that might be a good thing...
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