Why email tracking pixels are a waste of time
(Fig: Photo by Francesco Ungaro)
Email tracking pixels were supposed to make marketing smarter. Instead, they’ve made communication worse.
For years, marketers have relied on invisible 1x1 images — “tracking pixels” — to see if someone opened their email. It sounded like magic: proof that your message was seen. But in 2025, that magic is mostly smoke.
The illusion of insight
The “open rate” metric once served as a kind of dopamine hit — a simple number that made email campaigns feel measurable. But that number has been unreliable for years.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection, Gmail’s image caching, and corporate firewalls all strip, preload, or fake open events.
A 60% open rate might mean your subscribers love your content — or that their email client automatically opened everything for them.
In short: you don’t actually know who’s reading your emails anymore.
And that’s the point.
Privacy isn’t optional anymore
Today’s users expect — and deserve — privacy by default. Tracking pixels violate that trust, often without consent. They leak when, where, and how people engage. They build hidden profiles that serve marketers, not humans.
It’s no wonder email clients are fighting back. Pixels are blocked, preloaded, or anonymized — and that’s a good thing.
At Brandkit, we believe trust is more valuable than tracking. A brand that respects privacy earns loyalty that no metric can measure.
The false economy of “open rates”
If you can’t rely on the data, why collect it?
Tracking pixels waste resources — from engineering complexity to analytics noise. Teams spend hours debating numbers that don’t reflect reality. They optimize for vanity metrics instead of real outcomes.
The result: dashboards full of fake precision and decision paralysis.
What matters isn’t whether someone opened your email — it’s whether they acted on it. Replied. Clicked. Shared. Signed up. Booked a demo. Told a friend.
These are real signals. Everything else is background noise.
Measure what matters
Instead of obsessing over who “opened” your email, focus on what you control:
- Relevance: Write emails worth reading.
- Design: Make them easy to scan, on any device.
- Timing: Respect your audience’s attention.
- Calls to action: Give people something meaningful to do.
When you stop chasing pixels, you start building relationships.
A cleaner inbox, a better brand
Email tracking pixels belong to an old world — one that treated people as data points.
The new world of brand communication is transparent, human, and consent-based. It’s about clarity, not surveillance.
If you want people to open your emails, give them a reason to. Not a reason to block you.
At Brandkit we help brands to be authentic, and build trust — not track it. We’re building tools for the next era of brand communication: open, intelligent, and human-first.
For example: none of our our built-in email tools feature any kind of tracking, and we integrate with Plausible for 1st party privacy-first web analytics - for a better, safer, more private, more human approach to brand communications.
References & further reading
- “How Open Rate Tracking Can Hurt Your Email Deliverability ”, Mailforge, September 2025.
- “Working with Apple Mail Privacy Protection — Engagement”, Bloomreach documentation.
- “The end of email open rates: Why it’s time to move on”, Sopro blog.
- “Why Email Open Rates Are No Longer a Reliable Metric (And What to Track Instead)”, GlockApps blog.
- “Email Tracking Pixels in 2025: What Still Works”, Sparkle.io blog.
- “Email open rates – understanding email open rates”, Loops deliverability guide.
- “Preparing for Changes in Email Tracking and Privacy Regulations in 2025”, Postbox Services blog.
Happy branding :)
Why email tracking pixels are a waste of time
Email tracking pixels are outdated and ineffective in 2025. Learn why privacy laws, Apple Mail Privacy Protection, and Gmail updates have made “open rates” meaningless — and how brands can build trust through transparent, human-first communication. Ideal for marketers and organizations worldwide who value data ethics, privacy, and better brand engagement.
