France's data protection authority (CNIL) requires that recipients give prior, explicit consent before their email opens and clicks can be tracked. This is separate from consent to receive marketing email. A recipient can agree to receive your emails while declining to have their opens and clicks tracked, and these are two independent choices.
Pixel Tracking Opt-In is Bluecore's feature for honoring this by recipient, and it applies to any customer regardless of which email service provider they send through. Once enabled for a namespace, recipients who haven't opted into tracking stop having their opens tracked, and instead receive a link in the email footer where they can manage their tracking preference.
Customers sending through Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Oracle Responsys should also read the note near the end of this article, since those two platforms have an extra step for full coverage.
| User Role | View | Edit |
|---|---|---|
| Client Admin | Yes | Yes |
Before you begin
- Confirm the following:
How you identify recipients' location and how that is represented in your data. Understand if your systems tracks and records recipients located in France, or if you group your European subscriber base without location-level segmentation. If location isn't tracked at the recipient level, it's safest to assume the requirement applies to the customer's full European subscriber base until confirmed otherwise.
Discuss with your technical team on how you plan to capture and maintain consent for each recipient. Consent is set per recipient which should be recorded to your source of truth for all customer data.
- Reach out to your Bluecore CSM to enable the Pixel Tracking Opt-In feature.
How to enable Pixel tracking Opt-in
Confirm with your Bluecore CSM that the PixelTracking Opt-in feature is enabled.
Enables the feature from the email integration settings, under Global Configurations, using the Pixel Tracking Opt-In toggle. This is a namespace-wide setting, not something that can be turned on for individual campaigns.
If you want to preset receipients' opt-in preferences, share a file with your Bluecore CSM.
A recipient with no preference on file is treated the same as opted out. Once the feature is enabled, both a recipient explicitly opted out and a recipient with nothing on file stop receiving the open-tracking pixel. Only a recipient explicitly opted in keeps being tracked.A preference link is added to the email footer. Recipients can view and change their own tracking preference directly.
For SFMC and Responsys senders
In addition to all the steps outlined above, your Salesforce admin needs to set up a `DoNotTrack` attribute through Salesforce at the top-level Business Unit. Pixel Tracking Opt-In handles Bluecore's own tracking; this additional attribute is what tells Salesforce Marketing Cloud itself to suppress its own tracking for a given recipient's sends.
Platform limitation: Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a single setting that suppresses tracking, and it turns off open tracking and click tracking together. There is no way to keep click tracking on while turning off open tracking. This is a constraint of Salesforce Marketing Cloud itself, not something Bluecore or the customer can change.