In spring 2026, both France’s CNIL and Italy’s Garante introduced new positions on the use of email tracking pixels—the invisible images commonly used to measure email opens. While these rules currently apply only to recipients in France and Italy, they reflect a broader move towards greater transparency and consent in digital marketing.
What Does This Mean for You?
In 2026, France’s CNIL published guidance stating that email tracking pixels should be treated in much the same way as cookies. Shortly afterwards, Italy’s Garante issued a legally binding provision based on the same principle. Under both frameworks, using tracking pixels for campaign measurement, behavioural profiling or marketing analytics generally requires recipients to give explicit, purpose-specific consent.
There are important exceptions. Tracking used solely for operational purposes—such as maintaining mailing list hygiene, suppressing inactive addresses or supporting fraud prevention—may not require consent, provided the data collected is strictly limited and isn’t reused for marketing analytics.
If you are a business sending marketing emails to recipients in France or Italy, this creates an additional compliance challenge. Many email marketing platforms apply tracking pixels automatically across every campaign, making it difficult to distinguish between recipients who have consented and those who have not. Without the appropriate consent mechanisms in place, marketers may need to disable open tracking for these audiences, reducing visibility into campaign performance. Therefore, your business needs to get ahead of the curve, finding an alternative avenue that overcomes the increasingly stringent digital marketing requirements.
Although these measures currently apply only in France and Italy, the fact that two European regulators adopted similar approaches within weeks of one another suggests that marketers across Europe should keep a close eye on future regulatory developments.
Email Metrics Aren’t Always the Full Story
Even where tracking is permitted, email analytics have their limitations.
Many email clients block tracking pixels from loading, preventing genuine email opens from being recorded. Privacy features introduced by major email providers can also obscure or inflate open rates, making them a less reliable indicator of engagement.
As a result, marketers are increasingly relying on click-through rates, website behaviour and downstream conversions rather than open rates alone. Traditional email reporting should now be viewed as one part of the overall performance picture, rather than the definitive measure of campaign success.
Why Postal Marketing Is Standing Out
While digital channels become more crowded and measurement becomes more complex, physical mail offers something refreshingly different.
A professionally designed piece of direct mail reaches customers in a physical environment where there is significantly less competition for attention. It isn’t filtered into spam folders, hidden by inbox algorithms or affected by email privacy settings.
Just as importantly, postal marketing remains highly measurable. At Paperplanes UK, our Inflight analytics platform gives marketers clear visibility into campaign performance by tracking conversions, return on ad spend (ROAS), customer engagement, response timing and geographic performance through QR codes, personalised URLs and CRM integrations. This enables businesses to accurately attribute results and continually optimise future campaigns, making direct mail every bit as accountable and data-driven as digital marketing.
The Evidence Supports Direct Mail
The growing value of direct mail is supported by industry research.
According to The Door Drop Report 2026, produced in partnership with JICMAIL, door drop marketing remained a key player in 2025, withstanding uncertain economic market conditions.
The report highlights some encouraging trends:
- Door Drop campaigns delivered an average ROI of £5.40 for every £1 invested.
- Campaign expenditure increased by 1%, while distribution volumes grew by 3%, demonstrating continued advertiser confidence.
- Consumers interacted with Door Drops multiple times over a 28-day period, creating repeated opportunities for brands to engage with potential customers.
These findings reinforce the value of physical marketing in an increasingly digital world. As inboxes become more crowded and digital measurement becomes more complex, direct mail continues to deliver trusted, distraction-free engagement that drives action.
The Key Takeaway: Diversify Your Marketing Mix
While emails seem to remain popular, it is becoming harder to determine its effectiveness as a marketing strategy. The developments in France and Italy demonstrate that regulators are placing increasing emphasis on transparency and consent when it comes to email tracking, in an age where consumers are demanding greater control over their personal data.
Whether or not similar requirements emerge elsewhere in Europe, marketers should be thinking now about how they build a measurement strategy that doesn’t rely on a single channel. By combining email with measurable channels such as direct mail, businesses can gain a more complete understanding of campaign performance while continuing to deliver engaging customer experiences.
These developments don’t signal the end of email marketing, but they do highlight the growing value of building a marketing strategy that isn’t solely reliant on email tracking data. Integrating channels such as direct mail can provide businesses with an additional, measurable way to engage customers while reducing dependence on increasingly restricted digital metrics. At Paperplanes UK, we help businesses create direct mail campaigns that capture attention, generate measurable results and complement their wider marketing strategy.
