Your campaigns are sent and received by all your contacts. Only their opens are no longer reported in your statistics: the law now requires you to obtain a contact's consent before measuring their opens. Until this consent is recorded in Sarbacane, their opens are not counted.
The tracking pixel works like a read receipt: it lets you count when a contact opens your email. The CNIL now requires the recipient's consent to use it. This rule applies to all email senders, and Sarbacane complies with it just like everyone else.
Sarbacane does not know which contacts have given their consent. All your existing contacts have therefore been set to “Inactive”, and the pixel remains disabled for them. This is a precaution, not an error.
Update the tracking pixel consent field for your contacts in Sarbacane Contacts:
In Sarbacane Contacts, open your contact list.
Select the contact you want to edit.
Click Edit.
Set the pixel consent field to Active.
Save your changes.
This option is suitable if you have only a few contacts to update, or if you prefer to check each case individually.
Prepare your contact file (CSV with semicolon delimiter) by adding a consent column named pixel. If you are updating an exported list, rename the exported “Email pixel tracking consent” column to “pixel”.
Enter one of the permitted values in your file:
For an Active status (consent granted): Yes, True, Vrai or 1.
For an Inactive status (consent denied): No, False, Faux or 0.
Import the file into Sarbacane Contacts.
During the column mapping step, map the pixel column to the system field “Email pixel tracking consent”.
Important: name your column “pixel”. A column header containing the word “email” is not picked up during import, and your file must contain only one “email” column and only one “phone” column.
Create a campaign.
Add a title or question, for example: “Do you agree to let us measure email opens?”
Add a button and link it to the tracking preferences management page.
Send the campaign.
When a contact answers “yes” or “no”, their status automatically changes to “Active” or “Inactive”.
Important: only enable tracking for contacts whose consent you can prove. Enabling tracking without valid proof puts you at risk of non-compliance.
This is normal for campaigns already sent: updating consent is not retroactive. As long as a contact is “Inactive”, the tracking pixel is not inserted in the emails they receive. Campaigns sent before their consent was activated therefore cannot show their opens, even after you edit or reimport your contacts.
Opens are measured again on campaigns sent after your contacts have been set to “Active”.
If a new campaign still shows 0%, check:
that the “Email pixel tracking consent” field is set to Active on your contact records;
if you imported, that the pixel column was mapped to this field during the column mapping step;
that the campaign was sent after your contacts were updated.
→ How to import tracking pixel consent in Sarbacane?
→ Why are your open and click rates decreasing in Sarbacane?
→ Enable / disable behavioral tracking for your Sarbacane campaigns
