New Gmail Experiment & How to Counter It The Easy Way
Every year, Gmail has a stab at stopping cold emails.
This year is no exception, but, so far, I'm not impressed.
Over the last few weeks, Gmail has been experimenting with a massive banner warning users that images are hidden in the email they are looking at.
It looks like this:
Why would there be invisible images in emails?
Well, to track the open rate of outreach campaigns without disturbing the visual of the email, we (as software) add an invisible image (usually 1×1 pixel big so it can be served quickly) to record the request.
This allow us to know when the email was opened and in some situations, the right IP/location of the reader.
If you view the source of such email, it's pretty easy to spot:
That's the technology behind open tracking, and it's been like this for at least 10 years.
The issue here is that so-called experts are now claiming that this is the end of open tracking.
Besides the obvious attention seekers' behavior, they just don't have enough understanding of the situation.
But it's not their fault, here is what one of our competitors is saying on their blog just last week…
Well, after reading this newsletter, you'll know exactly what the problem really is and what to do next about it for your own campaigns.
So, here is our take on this issue at QuickMail and why you should never listen to those so-called experts or get your info from people click-baiting you.
Let's see…
No impact so far
This Google experiment has been in full swing for a few weeks now.
The first time I heard rumors of it was around mid-August.
Our system sends millions and millions of emails each month.
And yet, it looks like it had zero impact on cold outreach so far.
Check the average reply rate (per email) across all QuickMail accounts just for Gmail recipients, week-by-week.
As you can see, over the last 9 weeks, the average reply rate didn't change much for leads on Gmail.
If anything, we can see that people were on holiday during the summer and are back in full swing in September.
Some people have images turned off
Not everyone loads images when receiving emails.
For years, Gmail has had an option to let users decide if external images should be loaded.
And I'm one of them, for as long as I can remember, I always had "Ask before displaying external images" turned ON.
This means that I, and everyone else using this option, already see a deterrent banner (granted smaller and no report spam as a call to action) with every email containing open tracking.
People with this option don't see the big banner but they probably also never were fooled by an invisible pixel to start with.
Who uses Gmail anyway?
Looking at all the millions of leads uploaded to QuickMail, Gmail leads only account for 27.5%
This is obviously a big part of the market, but nowhere near the 90% that we are led to believe.
Fun fact, 29.9% of all leads are using Outlook, it's more than Gmail.
Side note: Yahoo is 3.5%, but I suspect those are from businesses contacting old mum and pap's shops :)
Are people reading on Gmail these days?
Let's face it, depending on time and type of job, many will be using their mobile phone to read emails.
Yet, this banner is not displayed on mobile, think Apple iPhone default mail client.
It's not just cold emails
When it comes to sending emails, it's not just cold email tools that rely on this technology.
Virtually all email-capable tools on the internet have pixel tracking when sending emails.
I'm talking about newsletters, CRM, or even support ticketing systems.
领英推荐
Curious to see how they would react to this.
New domains only
Rumor has it (from a friend running newsletters) that it's only for fresh new domains.
I could not verify this fully but this checks out with my findings.
I'll go further and say this is probably new domains not hosted on Gmail or Microsoft (think custom email infrastructure crap that people are desperate to use).
OK, what can/should you do?
Our recommendation is different than the ones of our competitors or influencers:
Option 1: Don't care
Monitor your reply rate. You can check for Gmail recipients and compare it to Outlook recipients (historically less likely to reply btw) and see if there is a change in trend.
And just to clarify, QuickMail only counts real answers, not "Out of Office" messages.
Option 2: Disable open tracking for Gmail recipients only
Knowing your open rate is a helpful tool.
Sure it's not accurate, but the trend is important.
Especially if you want to react faster to deliverability issues (and a game changer with deliverability AI).
Since other providers don't have this problem, why disable it for everyone?
In QuickMail, you can disable open tracking for Gmail recipients only.
You could also decide to only enable tracking on the second or third touch, so you have a chance to hit your lead with the first touch but keep the open tracking information on the second touch to keep assessing your deliverability with Gmail.
Option 3: Consider a visible open tracking
This is my favorite option, in QuickMail, we are adding the ability to simply track legit images you already have in your email.
You may have an image in your signature already, so why hide another one when we could use this one instead?
When clicking "Visible open tracking", QuickMail will check if there is an image in the email and use it for open tracking.
If it can’t find an image, it will add an invisible pixel that is not hidden like a normal pixel tracking.
Pro tip
If you want a more accurate open rate, the best way to do this is to increase your tracking delay.
Tracking delay is an option to wait a few seconds delays before listening to opens.
In this case, if an open is triggered within 30 seconds of the email being sent, it will be ignored.
This is because, despite best efforts, it's impossible to prevent all bots from opening emails.
But since bots only act as filters, then are only checking image when emails are received. Everything after is humans checking.
QuickMail update
Besides disabling tracking per provider and making tracking pixel visible, we are releasing the client portal this week.
Client Portal
Want to look more professional and impress your clients with valuable insights and advanced metrics displayed beautifully in all their glory in real-time?
Simply define your metrics view and share it with your client.
It's really that simple.
And since we can define multiple views of the metrics, you can have your team using an important view, while giving another one to your clients.
API v2
Our advanced API is now more powerful than most tools but we are not stopping here.
I'll keep you posted on the progress, but you can already access it if you ask our support team nicely.
Agency Dashboard
We are prioritizing the channel page at the agency level so you can view and manage all your emails and domains from the agency dashboard directly instead of checking each client space individually.
More to come soon!
When you are ready, here are 3 ways you can help
That's it for today!
Be amazing, Jeremy