For years, email marketers have relied on email opens to measure campaign success. However, privacy features such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection, inbox security tools and email client behaviour have made email opens an increasingly unreliable measure of engagement.
Now, European regulators are moving the conversation one step further by questioning whether tracking pixels should be used at all without prior consent.
Fortunately, Salesforce has recently introduced new controls in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) that give organisations much greater flexibility over how email tracking is managed.
This shift isn’t just about the reliability of email opens – it’s about whether organisations should be collecting that data in the first place.
What Has Changed?
In 2026, both the French CNIL and Italian Garante published guidance on the use of tracking pixels in marketing emails.
The guidance explains that, for many marketing use cases, tracking pixels should only be used with the recipient’s prior consent under the existing ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR. This isn’t a new law. Rather, it explains how existing privacy requirements should be interpreted and applied to email tracking technologies. CNIL recommendation on tracking pixels in emails
Both regulators have also provided transition periods to allow organisations time to review their email marketing practices. In France, the CNIL’s transition period for existing marketing databases runs until 14 July 2026, while the Italian Garante’s guidance provides a six-month transition period ending on 28 October 2026.
Although the guidance currently applies specifically to France and Italy, many organisations operating across Europe are reviewing their wider email tracking strategy rather than implementing different approaches for individual countries.
Why This Matters for Account Engagement Customers
Many Marketing Cloud Account Engagement features have traditionally relied on email open data, including:
Engagement Studio programmes
Dynamic Lists
Automation Rules
Lead scoring
Campaign reporting
If collecting email open data requires additional consent, organisations need to consider whether email opens should continue to drive marketing automation, segmentation, lead scoring and reporting – or whether stronger engagement signals should take their place.
Salesforce Has Introduced a Better Option
Historically, Account Engagement customers had limited choices. If you wanted to stop collecting email open data, you generally had to either:
Send text-only emails, or
Disable email tracking across the entire Business Unit, which also disabled click tracking.
Salesforce has now introduced new account-level Email Tracking settings that allow administrators to independently manage:
Email Open Tracking
Advanced Email Analytics
Email Click Tracking
This is a significant improvement for Account Engagement customers.
Rather than choosing between tracking everything or nothing, organisations can now disable email open tracking while continuing to send HTML emails and retain click tracking.
For many organisations, this provides a much simpler alternative to maintaining separate consent programmes or separate HTML and text-only marketing journeys.
Configuring the New Email Tracking Settings
The new tracking controls can be found under:
Account Engagement Settings → Email Tracking
From here, administrators can independently configure:
Email Open Tracking
Advanced Email Analytics
Email Click Tracking
These settings apply at the Business Unit level, so any changes should be agreed with your Legal, Compliance and Marketing teams before being implemented.
Review Your Automations Before Making Changes
Before disabling email open tracking, it’s worth identifying where email opens are currently used within your Account Engagement instance.
Common areas include:
Engagement Studio programmes
Automation Rules
Dynamic Lists
Completion Actions
Lead scoring models
Fortunately, Account Engagement already provides an Open Rules Audit report to help identify these dependencies.
Navigate to:
Reports → Marketing Assets → Automations → Open Rules Audit
This report provides a quick overview of any automation currently relying on email open criteria, making it much easier to understand what may need updating.
Best Practice: Don’t simply replace every Email Open condition with Email Click. Use this opportunity to review whether a stronger engagement signal – such as a landing page visit, form submission or consultation request – would provide a more meaningful measure of buying intent.
Focus on Meaningful Engagement
Even before these privacy changes, email opens had become an increasingly unreliable indicator of genuine engagement.
Rather than asking “Did they open my email?“, marketers should increasingly ask “Did they do something meaningful?“
Consider measuring outcomes such as:
Email click-through rates
Landing page visits
Form submissions
Content downloads
Webinar registrations
Consultation or demo requests
Campaign influence
Pipeline generated
Revenue won
These metrics provide a much stronger indication of customer intent and marketing performance than whether a tracking pixel happened to load.
Final Thoughts
The conversation around email open tracking isn’t really about losing a metric – it’s about improving the way we measure marketing success.
Privacy expectations will continue to evolve, but the most successful marketing teams won’t be the ones collecting the most data. They’ll be the ones measuring the data that genuinely reflects customer intent.
With Salesforce’s new tracking controls, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement customers now have the flexibility to align with evolving privacy requirements while continuing to deliver engaging HTML email experiences and shifting their focus from increasingly unreliable open rates to the engagement metrics that truly drive business results.
Original article: EU Privacy, Email Tracking and Account Engagement: What Customers Need to Know
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