Gmail might have just changed the entire game for SDRs. And it’s all to do with the innocuous email tracking pixel.
But first, let’s go back to the beginning.
Cold email has always been a sales staple.
Fire out 100 (...or more) emails to people you think are probably in your ideal audience, and wait for that one person to respond.
Open rate tracking is a massive part of this process. Marketers and salespeople need to know that their emails are actually being opened, not just thrown in the trash.
And so, the advent of the email tracking pixel. A tiny pixel image in the body of your email that, when downloaded by your recipient, sends a notification back to you saying your email has been opened.
It’s foolproof, right? Not anymore.
The Gmail tracking pixel: what’s changed?
Toward the end of August 2024, we heard anecdotal tales of significant changes happening in Gmail related to their ongoing anti-spam campaign.
Google has been clamping down on spam emails for a while, but blocking open rate tracking hasn’t explicitly been a part of that campaign.
Until now.
GTM and sales experts started talking about a new Gmail update showing a warning banner on emails containing “suspicious images.” Credit to Brendan Kazanjian on LinkedIn and Matt Jesuele on X for these screenshots.
The warning makes it abundantly clear to recipients that the sender is using email open tracking through a tracking pixel. And in one click, your recipients can report the email as spam, likely leading to any further emails going straight to junk.
The banner doesn’t just show on prospecting emails, though. It appears on every single email you send.
In one fell swoop, Gmail killed email open rate tracking and left thousands of SDRs wondering: what am I going to do now?
How important is email open tracking?
If you’re using an email service provider (ESP) like Outreach, SalesLoft, HubSpot, or Apollo for your email marketing, chances are that open rate data has been a critical KPI for your sales team.
A high open rate means you’re doing something right with your marketing copy: piquing your audience’s interest with a snappy subject line. It can also indicate that you’ve targeted the right people with your email campaign.
In addition to open rates, there are other email marketing KPIs to take note of. As Brendan Kazanjian notes above, reply rates can be equally valuable for your sales team if you’re actively prospecting.
However, there is a danger in overanalyzing your email campaign KPIs—especially if you’re not connecting these to your overall growth campaign.
In short, email marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
When you fire off an outbound email to a new prospect, that email should be just one part of an overarching sales and marketing campaign—your revenue orchestration efforts.
Sure, losing open rate tracking might seem like a huge deal to an email marketing professional who works almost entirely independently of the rest of your sales growth team.
And, according to research from Litmus, just 30% of marketers say their ESP is “highly integrated” or “very highly integrated” into other marketing channels.
However, if you’re running a tight revenue orchestration ship, losing this one KPI compared to all the other data points you’re tracking won’t seem like the end of the world.
How SDRs can adapt
At Warmly, outbound email is a core part of our sales strategy. Did our sales team panic when they heard that open rate tracking is no more? Nope.
So, when we heard about the Gmail tracking link changes, we went ahead and turned off open rate tracking on all our outreach[.]io emails. And it didn’t make a difference to our outbound strategy.
Why? Because email outbound is just one part of a coordinated, integrated sales strategy that drives prospects exactly where we want them: our website.
Thanks to Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization tools, we can tell exactly who has arrived on our website from email, socials, or search, see what pages they’re looking at, and engage with them directly on the website.
We call it signal-based revenue orchestration.
The email tracking solution: Warmly
Warmly unifies all your sales and marketing tools in one intuitive platform, enabling you to deanonymize website visitors, evaluate buyer intent, and conduct personalized outreach (via email and LinkedIn) from one place.
With Warmly, you don’t need email open rates (or reply rates or click-through rates) to see which prospects are interested. In fact, open rates are hardly as valuable as knowing which prospects are visiting your core brand home, your website.
Warmly deanonymizes 15% of contacts and 65% of the companies visiting your website and seamlessly syncs this information with your CRM.
You can see which pages your leads are viewing, how long they spend on your site, and even get instantly notified when they view a high-intent page.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you don't know who is reading your emails when you can see exactly who is on your website at any given moment. With Warmly, email prospecting is just one tool in your belt.
Integrated email prospecting
After you’ve learned which prospects are visiting your website, you can use Warmly’s AI Prospector tool to send personalized (and 100% automated, if you so wish) outreach to only the most relevant audience segments.
💡 See exactly how this works in our outbound playbooks.
But that's not all—when your SDR gets that Slack notification that tells them that a high-value lead is on your site, you can jump straight into a web chatbot with them.
Want to make even more of an impression? Use our instant live video chat to jump on a video sales call with the prospect.
💡 Read how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings in 8 minutes with Warmly’s AI Chat
🤠 Hear directly from our Head of Revenue & Ops, Keegan, about how Warmly solves the Gmail tracking pixel problem
The future of email marketing
Now, we don’t mean to scare SDRs, but this change could be just the beginning. Outbound is changing faster than most people can keep up with.
Cold calling is already dead. Cold emailing is going the same way now, too.
The future of outbound is going to be hyper-personalized, data-driven selling. And to do that, you need a platform that combines best-in-class data with the tools that will enable your sales teams to reach out to prospects instantly.
No more studying email open rates. No more endlessly waiting for prospects to reply (and getting mad at your salespeople when prospects don’t.)
See who's visiting your website → get notified when they're online → chat and video call instantly → close deals.
Want to see Warmly in action? Here's how Keegan, our Head of Revenue & Ops, closed a CEO using live video chat in minutes.
Warmly: smarter outbound
Speed to lead is a problem for almost all sales teams, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses. Cold email outreach can be cheap at scale, but it’s also time-consuming and not to mention demoralizing for your sales team.
So, help your sales team work smarter—not harder—with Warmly.
- Deanonymize website visitors.
- Use buyer intent insights to score leads.
- Route inbound leads to the right sales rep.
- Engage with prospects directly from your website.
- Personalize email and LinkedIn outreach based on lead segmentation.
You can get started with Warmly for free today. Or, book a demo to see it in action.