Sarbacane updated its tracking system to comply with French regulations: from now on, you must have prior consent from a contact before you can measure whether they open your emails.
Specifically, during this update, all your existing contacts were switched to "Inactive" status by default by default. This is a precautionary measure, not an error: as long as a contact is "Inactive", Sarbacane considers that they have not yet given their consent, and the open tracking pixel remains disabled for them.
This automatic switch explains why your open statistics may have dropped suddenly all at once, even though nothing changed in your campaigns.
This is the most important point to understand, and the one that causes the most confusion: open tracking and click tracking do not work the same way.
Open is measured by an invisible pixel embedded in the email image. This pixel only triggers if the contact has given their consent. This is the measurement affected by the new regulations.
Click, on the other hand, is not affected by this change. It continues to be measured normally, regardless of the contact's consent status.
This difference has a consequence: an "Inactive" contact who clicks on a link in your email will still appear as having "opened" the email in your statistics. This is not a bug: clicking on a link necessarily means having opened the email beforehand, so Sarbacane logically deduces an opening, even if the pixel itself measured nothing.
Concretely:
Status | Contact | Opening displayed? | Click displayed? |
Behavioral tracking enabled | Active | Yes | Yes |
Behavioral tracking enabled | Inactive | No (except on statistics) | Yes |
Behavioral tracking disabled | Active | No | No |
Behavioral tracking disabled | Inactive | No | No |
If you notice a drop in your open rate since the update, it is very likely related to this change, not a problem with your campaigns: the majority of your contacts have simply become "Inactive" while waiting for their consent to be provided. Your click-through rate, on the other hand, remains a reliable indicator since it is not affected by consent status.
Each contact record now contains two new pieces of information:
a field indicating whether the contact has consented to pixel tracking;
a date corresponding to when this consent was recorded in Sarbacane.
Two ways to fill them in, depending on your situation:
You already have proof of consent for your existing contacts → modify the relevant contact records directly in Sarbacane Contacts. This option is suitable if you have few contacts to update, or if you prefer to verify each case individually.
You have a list of contacts with their consent somewhere (customer file, CRM, form…) → re-import this list into Sarbacane by linking your consent column to the corresponding field. This option is faster if you need to update a large number of contacts at once.
The imported consent column must contain one of these values:
Active (gave consent): "Yes, True, True or 1"
Inactive (did not give consent): "No, False, False or 0"
Caution: only enable tracking for contacts for whom you can prove consent. Enabling tracking without valid proof exposes you to a compliance risk.
→ How to import tracking pixel consent in Sarbacane?
→ Why are your open and click rates decreasing in Sarbacane?
→ Enable / disable behavioral tracking of your campaigns Sarbacane
