E-Mail Tracking in Online Marketing - Methods, Detection, and Usage

E-Mail tracking uses personalized links and pictures for gathering in- formation on user behavior, for example, where, when, on what kind of device, and how often an e-mail has been read. This information can be very useful for marketing purposes. On the other hand, privacy and security requirements of customers could be violated by tracking. This paper examines how e-mail track- ing works, how it can be detected automatically, and to what extent it is used in German e-commerce. We develop a detection model and software tool in order to collect and analyze more than 600 newsletter e-mails from companies of sev- eral different industries. The results show that the usage of e-mail tracking in Germany is prevalent but also varies depending on the industry.

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