It allows you to evaluate the influence of your subject line and the first sentences of an email on your recipient. Tracking email open rate is one of the basic functions of Woodpecker.

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. How does it work?
​2. Why do we put an option to disable it?
​3. How to use the "Open tracking" option?
​4. Open tracking in If-conditions
​5. How can I know if the tracking is on or off?

6. Is a 100% open rate possible?

By default, we put an invisible pixel image in every email that Woodpecker sends from your mailbox. If the recipient opens an email, the image will load, and you will see it in Woodpecker's statistics. That's the only way to track email open rates in emails, and it is used by every email tracking tool on the market.

When your prospect opens the message, this action appears in the Prospects tab of your campaign, right in the "Last activity" column. Woodpecker counts opens after a few seconds so you can be sure the message was opened by your prospect and not a bot.
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SSL in email tracking

For all cautious fellows there: our tracking pixel is now based on HTTPS. It means your messages will get delivered even to the most protected inboxes.

Some email clients, like Google, block images from unknown senders by default. The recipient is told that the image in the message is blocked and may find this suspicious.

Emails written by hand do not have tracking pixels in them, so your recipient may know that machine sent the email. We have put this option to ensure that our emails look like the sender is a person, not a machine.

You can also choose to disable tracking for prospects using different providers. To do so, click on your campaign's Settings icon and checkmark the boxes under the "Open tracking" section. After disabling the tracking here, it will be disabled for the whole campaign.

On default, open tracking is switched on. You can turn it off in the Campaign editor.

Click the eye icon; you'll find it on the right side of the editor.

Open tracking has to be turned on in case you decide to add a condition to your email sequence. If you wish to disable it, first remove the condition.

In case the open tracking is turned off when adding the condition, Woodpecker will notify you about it saying "Turn on open tracking in the previous email."

If the email open rate tracking is turned on for at least one email in the sequence, you will see a % value.

If the email open rate tracking is turned off for all emails in the sequence, you will see a dash ( – ) instead of a % value, right in the Campaign view.

Generally, seeing a 100% open rate in your campaign should be a good sign – especially if the Prospect list is small and has been carefully selected. Sometimes, though, your emails are being thoroughly checked for suspicious content by the anti-spam filters, which could open your message in order to see if the message is safe.

This can lead to this "opening" being counted as a regular message opening, and in turn, showing up in your campaign statistics. How do you recognize it? Head to the Prospects tab in your campaign and filter them with the “Opened” criterium. After that, review your list by clicking on the dropdown icon and checking the “Last activity” column.

If you notice an email being opened just after it was delivered (so in the same exact moment or maybe seconds apart), there’s a chance it was opened by the antispam filter or by a bot. Single opens are something you don't have to worry about, but if you notice that most emails are opened this way, think about changing the content.

To avoid counting fake opens, Woodpecker does not count openings under about 7 seconds, and will not count reopenings within the first 15 minutes.