How Does Trackable Email Work?

Gain insight into your contact's behavior by sending trackable emails through Pipeline.

There's no way to look into somebody else's inbox due to privacy reasons. Therefore, a one-pixel image hosted on our servers is embedded in the body of the email. When our servers see that the image has been loaded, we know that the email has been opened. One pixel is small enough that your customers won't notice it; even the period at the end of that sentence is bigger than one pixel!

We are unable to track opens if your recipient's email client prevents images from being loaded when they open an email. That's why sometimes you can see that someone's clicked a link in an email, but you don't see that the email was opened. If they forward your email, refresh their mailbox or reload the content of your email, you may have more opens than expected since it counts how many times the image is loaded.

Link and attachment tracking work by routing your links through our servers. Clicks on a link or attachment take them to our server first, then redirects them to the appropriate link or file. When they visit our server, we know they clicked on the link or attachment.

We are able to block open notifications that originate from within your Pipeline account. If you open an email from the sent folder in your normal email client, your email client will not let us know who opened the email, just that someone using their service requested that the image be loaded and therefore will track as an open.

Tracked vs. Untracked email

While campaigns are tracked automatically, you can choose whether or not to track individual emails. Click Tracked (single recipient only) to switch between tracked and untracked emails. If you add additional recipients in the To, CC, or BCC fields, the email won't be able to track properly and is not supported for non-campaign emails sent to more than one person.

NOTE: Emails must be sent through Pipeline since we need to embed the tracking pixel in the body of the message. Emails sent through your normal email client won't be tracked even if you have a Pipeline extension installed on that client because the extension does not have the capability to embed that tracking pixel.