It's none of my business if you opened my email
It’s none of my business if you opened my email. And it’s none of your business if I opened yours.
Email tracking software may enable us to snoop on each other, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay. Just because I may find the information useful, that doesn’t mean it’s my business.
It’s interesting how easy we can compromise on basic ideas when it all of a sudden becomes convenient or beneficial to us. Or when it becomes the normal way of doing business.
Technology has made it far too normal to track our colleagues, prospects, and customers.
If I send you an email from an email app that tracks opens and clicks, I can see if you’re really interested in what I have to say. The app will tell me how many times you open the email and it will tell me how many times you clicked on links that I included in my email. If you’re really interested in what I had to say and happen to open it and then return to it 4 or 5 times as you go throughout your day – I can be privy to all of this. I can even enable notifications when you read my email so that I can turn my stalking up to level 9 and email you while you’re reading my email.
I can also tell if you read my email and you’re just ignoring me.
How is that acceptable? What makes us think that because we sent the email that we’re somehow entitled to know what someone does with it?
Imagine saying to someone, “I bought you a new shirt for Christmas and I also included a tracking bug that tells me how many times you wear it so that I know if you actually liked it because it’s really important to me that you like it. I was the one who gave it to you so it’s my right to know if you liked it.”
Yeah, that’s insane.
So why is it okay to snoop on how many times someone opens my email just because I sent it to them?
Well, it’s not. But it’s normal. So businesses just do it.
You send an email to a client or a prospect and you see that they read it five times – would you want them to know that they read it five times? Not really. They would feel awkward if they knew their behaviour is being watched. And, unless you’ve already gotten used it yourself, there’s even a certain level of awkwardness being on the end of watching someone’s behaviour without them knowing it – particularly if they do something outside the norm. Those are the biggest giveaways that there is some sort of invisible line that is being crossed.
Can this type of tracking information be useful? Yeah sure, to a point. But are you really going to be that person that emails them again saying, “I know you read my email – why didn’t you respond?”
I mean, if it’s in you to do that, then maybe it’s good that your prospects and customers get to see that side of you so they can run for the hills.
Sure, tracking allows you to see whether subscribers to your mailing list are opening your emails and you can tweak your email subjects to try to improve open rates. But is Open Rate really the metric that matters? There are ways to track email effectiveness without personally identifying who did and who didn’t open our emails. Isn’t the goal for signups or conversions anyway?
Just because it’s the way something is done, does not mean it’s the way it ought to be done.
That’s why our team stopped using email trackers a while ago. If a service we use (like Help Scout or Mailchimp) provides tracking, we turn it off.
We weren’t always tracker-free. Nowadays most business email tools come with tracking built-in and enabled by default and it’s easy to just get used to it. But we realized that it just isn’t any of our business what our customers do with the emails we send them. We don’t want to be tracked, so why should we be tracking others?
And honestly, it hasn’t hurt our business. More than that, we’re respecting people’s privacy the way we want our privacy respected, and that’s more important to me than knowing if they opened my email.
Originally published on Function v. Style