How I send and grow my newsletter without open and click tracking

I’ve been sending a tech-history themed newsletter for a little over a year now, without enabling Buttondown’s tracking features. My motivation for that, if I’m being really honest, was less about doing the right thing and more about that inescapable human desire to be one of the cool kids. And privacy advocates will always be cooler than data collectors and brokers.

Tracking is turned on by default in most apps (except Buttondown!), and most people use apps that they don’t even realize infringe on others’ privacy. So I don’t get mad at individuals who try to track or fingerprint me when I open their newsletter or click a link from their website. They may not even know they’re doing it! The ones who do, however, those who scrutinize and scry open times and clicked links, desperately trying to divine what subscribers do and don’t like, are not what I'd call aspirational.

Most newsletter tracking analytics are vague at best and deceptive at their worst. Both Gmail and Apple Mail pre-load email images, for example, meaning that a tracking pixel sent to either inbox will return the time and location of an open that is completely disassociated from when your subscriber actually read your newsletter, if they did at all.

Then, on top of all the social and analytical drawbacks of email tracking, there is the question of deliverability. While it’s not an issue for my newsletter or those that mostly send to non-professional domains, some corporate and enterprise email servers and clients will bury newsletters that contain tracking pixels and click tracking in subscribers’ promotional or spam folders.

So yes: Every sender’s situation is different and I do not judge those who have these features enabled. It’s ok to be uncool. All I ask is that if you do track subscribers, you do so intentionally, with a full understanding of how tracking actually works and what your justifications are for using it. Because I believe the goodwill you earn from respecting subscribers’ privacy is worth more than twice the shaky analytics data it replaces. Plus, there are plenty of valuable data points that don’t require logging and timestamping your readers' email habits.

Privacy-friendly newsletter performance tracking

Replies are the number one indicator of what people enjoy most about your emails. A happy subscriber opens and reads your newsletter; a True Fan replies to it. But only if you invite them to. “I'm confident that some variation of ‘plz reply’ is the best way to drive engagement, especially when you've got a somewhat amorphous newsletter,” Buttondown founder Justin Duke wrote on the blog back in 2023. Best of all, replies don’t even need to be tracked or measured. The messages they contain are the data.

Subscribers only reply when they have something to say, which is infinitely more valuable than a quantitative metric like what time of day they wrote their response. Still, if you’re a Buttondown user, you can add a Replies chart to your Analytics tab to graph them by the day or week they were sent. Or add a Replies column in your Emails view and sort by which newsletter issues generated the most responses.

There are two subcategories of replies that generate equally valuable data without using hidden pixels or trackers as a crutch. First are newsletter comments, essentially public replies. They’re not a reliable engagement metric for every newsletter, but if you’re sending community-powered emails, comments can be even more informative than replies. And they too can be graphed and sorted in your Analytics and Emails tabs.

Finally, there are newsletter surveys, which insert a question and a list of clickable answers into the body of your email. Any time a subscriber clicks one of the options, their answer is added to their Activity feed and the Surveys tab, where you can see an aggregate breakdown of all the responses. More measurable than freeform replies and comments, surveys are the best way to zero in on specific aspects of what’s working well in your newsletter and what’s not.

Surveys are great for polling subscribers about which topic to tackle next, which segment they enjoy the most, or how often you should send emails. You might want to insert a note that their answer will be associated with their address, just to be absolutely sure that they know how you’re combining the data. But, for me, this is completely different than tracking someone’s IP address, device information, etc. I think anyone responding publicly–whether that’s with a reply, comment, or survey–is OK with you logging that as a performance indicator.

I write a retro and history-focused newsletter and, for that particular niche, webmentions are an another channel for feedback. Anytime somebody publishes a new link to my archives on a blog platform that recognizes webmentions, Buttondown lets me know. And while I doubt webmentions would be all that helpful for something like a company or nonprofit newsletter, they’re tremendously useful for indie creators and artists hoping to find an audience on the small web (a place where respecting privacy absolutely earns you extra points).

Every metric up until this point qualifies as privacy-friendly because it is something subscribers openly share with you and your other readers. Social media posts fall into that category as well. You could search for your archives URL or subject lines manually, or leave it to your newsletter platform to watch for mentions. Buttondown’s social media monitoring (still in beta for what it’s worth) will send you a notification about any relevant mentions on Twitter/X, Bluesky, or Mastodon, with GitHub and Reddit in the pipeline. In fact, I think all of my recent social media connections have come from notifications of people sharing my newsletter.

Another metric that plays well with my particular audience profile is RSS subscribers. Although it’s only an approximation, I can pop over to my Analytics tab a few days after every send to see a breakdown of which RSS readers people use to view my posts, and whether those numbers got a bump after a particularly well-liked email.

The last truly privacy-friendly data point I’ll mention is the list of unsubscription reasons you show when someone clicks unsubscribe. Unlike some newsletter platforms, Buttondown doesn’t use default or templated unsubscription reasons. Readers won’t see anything other than a polite goodbye message until you add your own options. I appreciate that because the things I’m most worried will annoy my audience are far more specific to my newsletter than what I tend to see in most unsubscription forms. I want to know if people think my writing is too long-winded, in the weeds, technical, or opinionated, for instance. Someone unsubscribing to a specific email already tells me so much. But if they pick one of the reasons I proffer it tells me way more.

I’m sure that some people will take umbrage with some of these suggestions as “privacy-friendly.” To me, as long as my grandma wouldn’t be surprised that an action on an email generated a data point, it’s OK to track. She would assume that replying would get logged and timestamped. She would not expect that opening an email told the sender her general location and what mobile phone she read it on. That heuristic works for me, but you’ll need to come up with your own. If you’re worried about flying blind by turning off tracking, though, just remember that you can:

• Encourage replying to your newsletter, using those responses to get a feel for subscribers’ tastes.
• Enable comments to see what people are most interested in sharing publicly.
• Insert surveys into your emails to ask for feedback and input.
• Watch for mentions of your content on social media to see what subscribers and non-subscribers are saying.
• Keep tabs on how many people are reading your content through RSS readers and how that number changes over time.
• Add specific unsubscription reasons to your one-click unsubscription landing page so you can course correct based on unhappy readers.

If you’re writing a newsletter for the love of it, because you have something you can’t not share, tracking is utterly pointless. Create what you’d want to consume and damn the rest. If, on the other hand, you need a platform to market yourself or your work, try sending three or four times without any tracking enabled. See if it changes how or what you write about. I bet it won’t, the cool kids don’t obsess over little details like that.

And you seem pretty cool.