Honour a per person consent field when injecting the email open tracking pixel, within a single email

SUMMARY

Make open tracking a per recipient decision driven by a person field, evaluated at send time, instead of an asset level setting. One email asset would then serve both consenting and non consenting recipients, and native Opened Email activity would still be generated for the consenting recipients only.

TODAY

The only control over the open pixel is the asset level flag isOpenTrackingDisabled, exposed as the "Disable Open Tracking" checkbox in Email Settings and on the Emails Asset REST API. It is all or nothing for the asset.

Adobe's own CNIL guidance therefore instructs customers to build two variants of every email, one tracked and one untracked, plus a Smart Campaign Choice step on a consent field to route recipients between them. Adobe Support has confirmed this is the only supported approach.

Setting isOpenTrackingDisabled to true suppresses the pixel for every recipient of that asset, and Opened Email is a system activity that cannot be written back through the REST API, so there is no supported way to retain native open reporting for a consenting subset from a single asset.

WHY THIS MATTERS

The CNIL recommendation on email tracking became applicable on 14 April 2026, with the transition period for pre existing contacts ending 14 July 2026. The Italian Garante deadline is 28 October 2026. Any organisation sending marketing email into France or Italy is now obliged to obtain consent before measuring opens for campaign performance purposes.

The two variant workaround imposes a permanent and compounding cost:

1. Every email asset must be cloned, and both copies edited, reviewed, approved and quality checked for every send. The duplication multiplies by the number of affected locales.

2. The two variants drift. A late content change applied to one copy and not the other ships an inconsistent email, and nothing in the product flags the divergence.

3. Reporting fragments. Metrics for one send are split across two assets and have to be recombined by hand outside Marketo.

4. Leads whose consent field is null are routed to the Default Choice, which sends the tracked variant. Getting this right requires an explicit backfill of every existing person record, and a single missed backfill tracks people who never consented.

None of this is a content or design problem. It is one boolean per person that the platform already stores and already evaluates at send time for Choice steps and for Velocity.

PROPOSED BEHAVIOUR

Allow the open pixel injection decision to reference a person field. For example, a third state on the email asset alongside enabled and disabled, such as "Open tracking: driven by field", with a field selector, so that at send time Marketo injects the pixel only for recipients whose selected boolean field is true.

Expected outcomes:

One asset per email, no clones.

Opened Email activity generated for consenting recipients, exactly as today.

No pixel and no activity for non consenting recipients.

Email Performance Report open metrics describe the consenting population, with the untracked population excluded rather than counted as unopened.

Exposed on the Emails Asset REST API alongside isOpenTrackingDisabled so that the setting can be applied programmatically across a large asset library.

Marketo already evaluates person fields per recipient at send time for Choice steps, dynamic content and Velocity. This asks for that same evaluation to be applied to one existing platform behaviour.

RELATED

Companion idea covering the equivalent problem for click tracking: link rewriting suppressed per recipient rather than per link.

Adobe CNIL guidance: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/marketo/using/product-docs/email-marketing/email-designer/cnil-guidance

Emails Asset API, isOpenTrackingDisabled: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/marketo-developer/marketo/rest/assets/emails