Why Monk doesn't track email opens

"Can I see if the client opened Julia's email?"

We get this question a lot. It's fair to ask, since almost every tool shows open rates.

We don't track opens, and we do it on purpose. Here's why, starting with the part most people miss: the open rate isn't a number you should trust in the first place.

How open tracking works

To know whether someone opened an email, a tool hides a tiny invisible image in the message. When the email loads that image, it pings the sender's server, and the ping gets counted as an "open."

The open rate isn't reliable

The pixel only fires when images load, and whether images load has little to do with whether a person read the email.

Outlook, by default, doesn't load images, so every genuine open from an Outlook user goes uncounted.

Gmail does the opposite. It scans and caches images automatically, before the recipient even opens the message. We've seen open rates sit near 99% for that reason alone, because Gmail is loading everything on the recipient's behalf.

So the same metric undercounts one set of customers and overcounts another.

It also costs you deliverability

Mailbox providers treat a tracking pixel as one of the signals of bulk marketing rather than real correspondence, so loading a message with tracking makes filters more suspicious of it. If that pixel pushes your email into spam, the open you were trying to measure never happens. The dashboard looks fine. The email is in spam and the invoice is still unpaid.

For collections, that is a bad trade. The whole point is getting a real message in front of the customer so they pay.

Optimizing for opens is the wrong goal

Even if the number were accurate, chasing it would point you the wrong way. Open rate is easy to inflate. Put "open this email to win $1M" in a subject line and your open rate will jump while your collections get worse. Optimizing for a metric like that pulls effort toward looking good instead of closing a collection.

What we track instead

We measure the things that tell you collections is working: reply rate and, above all, dollars collected. A reply is a real person choosing to engage.

The one exception

Some customers set up a dedicated subdomain or sub-inbox and want open tracking on emails. We can turn it on there, but only when the team understands the tradeoff and still wants it.

This is also one of the defaults we set up for customers rather than leaving to them. Most finance teams don't have time to learn the quirks of email deliverability, so we make the choice that helps you get paid and handle the setup behind it, and you can always change it. At Monk, we will always set a sensible default, but ensure you stay on control.

Our take

Deliverability beats vanity metrics every time. The job of a collections email is to reach a real person and move a payment. Open tracking works against that on both counts: it makes the message more likely to land in spam, and it rewards the wrong behavior. We would rather send a clean email that gets read and paid than chase a number that looks good in a report.

Want to see how Monk handles collections email? Book a demo.