Over the past few weeks, you’ve probably received a whole bunch of newsletters telling you about their « tracking pixel », with a button to opt out (that’s because the _CNIL has just said that these pixels are just like browser cookies: you have to be told they’re being used and asked for your consent).

But what exactly is a tracking pixel? It’s a tiny, blank, transparent image (one pixel wide by one pixel high). Every time you open an email, this little snitch reports it back to the sender (along with the time and the device you’re on). Hence the nickname « spy pixel ».

Why do brands use them? To do all sorts of things:

• If you only open emails on one topic, from then on you only get that topic (fair enough)
• If you open often, you get labelled an « engaged reader » and receive even more emails (hmm, more annoying)
• If you didn’t open it, the same email is sent to you again a few days later with a different subject line (not cool)
• If you stop opening anything at all, the brand exports your email address to Insta, Google and YouTube to find your profile and target you with ads on those platforms (not cool at all).
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At Loom, though, we do none of that: no automatic follow-ups, no segmentation based on what you open (we wouldn’t know how anyway, and we can’t be bothered to learn), no exporting your address to Instagram to show you ads (because we don’t advertise). In fact, since we refuse to push people into buying more, we don’t really need any of those features.

So we’ve switched off individual email open tracking via _{tracking pixel}. In other words, we no longer know who opens our emails, or when. YEYEYEYE FREEDOM!

It also means we’ll no longer measure the « open rate » of our newsletters. To tell whether what we write is any good, we still have other indicators, like the unsubscribe rate… or your replies (which are always welcome): when a newsletter is rubbish, we find out very quickly ;-)

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