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Email open and click tracking

Email & SMS delivery

Also called: open rate, click tracking, email engagement

Email tracking records whether a recipient opened a message or clicked a link in it — opens via a tiny embedded image, clicks via a redirect — producing the engagement data behind open rates, click rates and behaviour-triggered follow-up.

Open tracking has been unreliable since privacy-protecting mail clients began pre-fetching images on the recipient's behalf. Those pre-fetches register as opens, which inflates open rate and makes it useless as a precise measure.

It remains useful as a relative signal. Comparing this campaign's opens to last campaign's, on the same list, still tells you something — just never treat the absolute number as the share of humans who read it.

Clicks are much stronger evidence, because a click requires an intentional action. Any behaviour-triggered automation worth building should key on clicks rather than opens.

How it works in FrazzleCRM

  • Tracking is a company-level setting and is off unless enabled — no tracking pixels are injected into your sending without that switch.
  • With it on, email opened and email clicked become triggers, and clicks can be narrowed to destinations containing given text.
  • Both are also goal events, so a sequence can jump a contact forward the moment they engage.
  • The first open and the first click are what fire; a flow does not re-trigger on every subsequent open of the same message.

Where teams get this wrong

Building a re-engagement flow on has not opened in 90 days marks engaged people as dormant, because their mail client may never load images. Base dormancy on clicks and replies, and let opens be a tiebreaker at most.

Common questions

Why is my open rate suspiciously high?

Privacy-protecting mail clients pre-fetch images, registering opens no human performed. It affects some audiences far more than others, so compare like with like over time rather than against a benchmark.

Can I trigger an automation on a click to one specific link?

Yes — a click trigger can be scoped to destinations containing given text, which is how one email can route readers by which offer they clicked.

See it on a real map

Free templates where this shows up as an actual node. Clone one and the diagram runs as the automation.

Related terms

Or browse all 24 terms — grouped by what part of the funnel they belong to.

Draw it once, and it runs

In FrazzleCRM the funnel map IS the automation — every node you draw is a real step, and every step you edit redraws the map. Free plan, no credit card.

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