Recent changes in the reliability of campaign results

Hello Zoho Community,

This post isn't to bring up a specific issue with Zoho Campaigns specifically, but rather to discuss an issue we've been seeing more often in regards to email campaigning in general. The issue is something we've seen not only with Zoho Campaigns but with Mail Chimp, Constant Contact and Zoho CRM's "Mass Email" function.

The issue is that campaign results appear to be inaccurate. For example, you may send a campaign to someone who you know is out of the office on vacation. Yet, they show up as having opened the email. We tested this by sending to internal users, making sure they don't open the e-mail, yet it shows as being opened.

We've even had reports that a contact's email bounced on a campaign but the Zoho CRM user still received a "Sales Signal" that the message was opened. How can a bounced email get opened?

My theory is that email clients "open" the email so that it can show the first few sentences of the email in a preview window on the recipients phone/desktop. Or perhaps a virus scanner is opening the emails and scanning the links to determine the threat level of the email. Could those actions cause inaccurate results for campaigns?

For added info, we're a CRM consultancy, we have 4-5 different clients over the last 6 months bring these issues to our attention. That makes it unlikely to be an isolated issue with a specific account, user, or setup.

Thanks in advance,

Marshall Hayes

CRM Pro Partners

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