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GMail Image Caching Measures the Effectiveness of an Email Marketing Campaign

Decent Essays

Why Gmail’s Adding Image Caching is Important
Because image tracking can be used to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign, based in some part on the open rate, it has become a fundamental part of the email marketers took kit. Therefore, Gmail’s decision in December 2013, to add image cashing, seems to have created concerns for a great many people, not all of these concerns can yet be answered. It is also worth remembering that Gmail has in the past decided to roll things out, and then taken the decision to roll them back in favour of a phased transition to deployment.
According to Google the reason they have made these changes is to “make messages more safe, secure and faster than ever before” whether using your computer …show more content…

Reputedly, Google claim to have resolved the malware issue by hosting images via a proxy server. This means that any embedded malware contained in an email won’t show up. Security researchers claim that this new technology poses an even more serious threat, in that Google are now able to read its users messages both without their permission, and whether or not the messages have been opened. There have also been claims that spammers are able to email the same image to everyone, assigning every image with a unique url. Each url would then provide a tracking facility informing spammers if the email had in fact been opened or not.
Google responded by saying they offer a feature that allow users to 'opt-out' of displaying any images in emails. They also said that they can remove the proxy server if the image display was a problem, and require the user to press 'show images.'
The Impact on Using Email Marketing for Businesses
For users of Gmail the changes simply mean that images contained in the emails they receive will be automatically displayed in the messages, without the need to click on a link to view it.
Businesses that use email marketing, specifically analytical packages, the data of certain data could be affected. The data will now be sourced from the Google proxy servers as opposed to previously pulled directly from recipients directly opening the marketing messages. Whilst

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