How Google Apps and Gmail Image Caching Affects Marketing Emails

MailChimp has done a good job clarifying the confusion on the impact of Google's recent change to how images embedded in emails are displayed. Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo, for example, misunderstood the impact of the change but has since revised his article with updated information.

Many of our customers use MailChimp or Constant Contact for email marketing since they integrate beautifully with Norada's Solve360 CRM and other CRM solutions. MailChimp also integrates with Google Apps so that you don't need to remember yet another password and can better protect your account with Google's free two-factor authentication.

Google Apps and Gmail accounts represent about 475 million users worldwide.

The key points are:

• The tracking of unique opens of marketing emails by Gmail web interface users is improved by this Google Gmail change.
• The tracking of repeat opens by recipient is defeated by the image caching used by Gmail for web interface users.
• Gmail users that access their email via POP or IMAP clients like Outlook, native iPhone mail, etc., are not affected by the change since the client software opens the images.
• The privacy of Gmail and Google Apps users is greatly improved by the change since your own computer's IP address, which can disclose your physical location, as well as browser and version, operating system, and more, is no longer disclosed to the sender by the unique images embedded in emails by all the leading email marketing software solutions.

Certainly reach out to us at Interlockit.com if you'd like to learn more about this change.