If you’ve noticed Gmail flagging your emails as suspicious or hiding images, you’re not alone! 🤔 This issue has hit many marketing teams. Is this a cause for a change of strategy?
The culprit? Email tracking pixels – automation tools integrate tiny pixels into your emails that signal when an email is opened.
With Gmail’s recent crackdown, these pixels are now being detected, and recipients are seeing this image.
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Google isn’t directly targeting images or open tracking, but flags them in emails that are seen suspicious by other factors. You sender reputation, targeting, and previous interactions with a prospect are taken into account.
What does this change?
Even though open rates aren’t the end-all-be-all campaign success metric, they’ve been a key indicator of deliverability. A drop in open rates often means your emails are heading to spam.
What can you do?
We’ve prepared a short list of measures.
- Turn off open tracking 📵 The first step is to turn off open tracking in your automation tool. Tracking settings are available in the first step of building a campaign. Find them in the upper right corner.
- Remove images/logos from your emails ✂️ Try to avoid using images in your emails, including logos and signatures. Opt for plain text messages.
- Track link clicks 🔗 Link clicks can help you understand how actively users are engaging with your content. Closely monitor link clicks in your analytics.
You can export and view detailed reports to see exactly who clicked on your links.
- Focus on reply rates 💬 Reply rate is a key metric that shows the success of your campaigns. If you’re getting replies, whether positive or negative, at least your messages are hitting the inbox.
- Use email deliverability tools to check deliverability. If you used open tracking to determine whether your emails are heading to spam, use tools like glockapps to test your email deliverability, as the open rate metric may no longer be accurate.
- Don’t rely solely on email! Mix it up with multichannel outreach like LinkedIn 🔄 With Google rolling out new restrictions aimed at email marketing, this year marketers/salespeople must acknowledge the risks associated with relying solely on email as a primary outreach channel. To adapt effectively, you have to integrate email within broader, multifaceted strategies and multiple outreach channels.
Adapt now and don’t let Google’s new policies sink your ship! ✉️
