BBC NEWS’ Leo Kelion published the article ‘Spy pixels in emails have become endemic’ on 17th February 2021.
Tracking pixels, tinydots, invisible beacons, Web beacons are, as the name implies, code embedded in emails or web pages to allow organisations to track emails unobtrusively. In their early days they were mainly the domain of web analytics companies. Social media jumped on the bandwagon to fuel insights-driven advertising. Now they are used by all types of organisations to track email sent, received, and read status. In financial services this was driven by a 2-headed monster – compliance and marketing – the share-of-wallet imperative to up/cross-sell. But with increasing legislative mandates (GPDR, anti-hawking legislation in Australia) to ensure customer privacy, is the day of the spy pixel over? Ask yourself the question; “Say my insurance company asked me for permission to track my behaviour in an email they sent me with my Insurance Renewal, would I say, “no worries, of course?!” Or is “NO” more likely?
In the Customer Communications Management domain, we see many clients migrating from their analogue, print-centric world to one where emails with PDF attachments are sent as the primary channel to their customers. How do they prove that they sent the document, the customer received or read the document, in the event of a compliance incident? It’s also important to understand that not all email clients load these tracking images by default. Apple’s Mail.app, Microsoft Outlook and others don’t load images. As such your customers may have received a document, opened it, and read it but there is no way you can track or know this. And if its marketing-based communications then your vital statistics - “opens percentage” and “unique opens” are at best, approximate.
Best practice to meet compliance obligations cannot just focus on the cost reduction of the attractive email option; it must include planning and execution of a multi-channel strategy that automates a ‘next-best-action’ so that the organisation can say, hand-on-heart, that they took all reasonable steps to communicate with their customer.
Written by Steve, March 2021
