Hi @erinreyehair. This is one of the drawbacks of any marketing app, whether it be Constant Contact, Square or anyone else. These days, most of them use something called a tracking pixel to try to track when an email is opened. Each email in a campaign has a pixel that is unique to that email address and when the email is opened it triggers a function that tells Square the pixel was “viewed.”
Where this becomes a problem is multifold. First, many email clients (the app we use to view emails) block tracking pixels and either don’t report on opens or they report the email as “opened” when their servers receive it. Some email servers actually scan emails for spam text which sends a false trigger back to Square almost immediately. Most likely the latter reason is the one that you, personally, are seeing if you have a spam/junk email box that is activated.
All of these “false” opens are the result of security enhancements to try to weed out spam, phishing and other scams that are everywhere these days. Unfortunately, email is a very old technology — dating back to the 1960s. There is no built-in receipt/open tracking so all we can do is build these kludges that are imperfect.
Even if you were using Constant Contact or another marketing app, though, you’d see roughly the same results. It’s just what it is. All I, or anyone else, is able to do is approximate results. These days I don’t look at absolute numbers, but rather I compare average results of campaigns and look for anomalies and trends. It’s about the best that can be done until the world (and I mean the world) comes up with a more robust email solution than the one that we are limping along with now.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)
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