How to Activate Email Tracking in Pipedrive

You sent the proposal. Three days of silence. You don’t know if they read it, ignored it, or forwarded it to six colleagues.

That’s exactly what email tracking in Pipedrive solves.

When you know the moment a prospect opens your email or clicks a link inside it, you stop guessing and start acting. The data tells you when to follow up — and how. Reps who respond to a prospect within an hour are 700% more likely to have a meaningful conversation than those who wait longer, according to Harvard Business Review. But that kind of timing only works when you have real-time visibility into what your prospect just did.

This guide walks you through everything: how to activate email tracking in Pipedrive, how to read notifications, where to view engagement history, and how to turn those open signals into actual meetings.

What Is Email Tracking in Pipedrive?

Email tracking in Pipedrive lets you see two things with precision:

• When a recipient opens an email you sent from Pipedrive
• When they click a link inside that email

It works through a tracking pixel — a tiny, invisible image embedded in the email. When the recipient opens the message, their email client loads that pixel, which tells Pipedrive the email was opened. Link tracking works through redirect URLs that log a click before taking the recipient to the intended destination.

The result: every open and every click gets timestamped and logged inside Pipedrive against the deal, contact, or lead it’s linked to.

This matters more than most people realize. About 9% of sales emails are opened on average (EmailAnalytics), and cold outreach reply rates have dropped to just 3.43% across billions of campaigns (Instantly Benchmark Report 2026). With numbers like that, knowing which prospects are actually engaging becomes your most valuable signal.

Note: Email tracking is only available on Pipedrive’s Advanced, Professional, and Enterprise plans. It is not included in the Essential plan.

Before You Start: Connect Your Email Account

Email tracking only works after you’ve connected an email account to Pipedrive. If you haven’t done this yet, head to Personal Preferences → Email Sync and connect your Gmail, Outlook, or other supported email provider before following the steps below.

Once your email is connected, you’re ready to activate tracking.

How to Activate Email Tracking in Pipedrive (Step-by-Step)

Step One: Open Personal Preferences

Click your profile icon in the top-right corner of Pipedrive. From the dropdown menu, select Personal Preferences.

Step Two: Go to Email Sync

In the left sidebar of your Personal Preferences panel, click Email Sync.

Step Three: Navigate to Account Settings

Under the Email Sync section, click on the Account tab. Scroll down to find the Advanced Settings area.

Step Four: Toggle Tracking Options

You’ll see three tracking options you can turn on:

• Track when recipients open emails — records every time your email is opened and timestamps each instance
• Track when recipients click links in emails — records when any link in your email is clicked
• Get alerts in Pipedrive for email tracking activities — sends you a real-time notification inside Pipedrive when an open or click happens

Toggle the options you want to enable. Your settings save instantly — no confirmation button needed.

That’s it. Every email you send from Pipedrive from this point forward will carry tracking by default.

How to Turn Tracking On or Off for Individual Emails

Your account settings control the default state. But you can override tracking for any individual email directly from the email composer.

When you open the email compose window in Pipedrive, you’ll see two small icons at the bottom of the window after tracking is enabled:

• An eye icon for open tracking
• A chain link icon for link click tracking

Click either icon to toggle it on or off for that specific email. The icon turns solid when tracking is active and goes grey when it’s off.

Important: Changes made in the composer don’t update your default settings — they only apply to that one email.

How to View Email Tracking Notifications

If you’ve turned on “Get alerts in Pipedrive for email tracking activities”, you’ll get real-time notifications right inside Pipedrive.

Look for the lightbulb icon in the top-right corner of your Pipedrive dashboard. Click it to open your Notifications panel. Every tracked open and click will appear here with exact timestamps — including if a prospect opens your email multiple times.

A prospect opening your email six times in one afternoon? That’s a buying signal. That’s the moment to call.

Research shows that 35–50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first (Xant). Notifications remove all lag between intent and action.

Where to View Full Email Tracking History

Beyond notifications, you can view tracking data in two places:

Inside the Sales Inbox: Open your Sales Inbox in Pipedrive and click Filters. Select Tracked Emails from the dropdown to filter your inbox to only show emails with tracking enabled.

Open any tracked conversation and hover over the icons next to an email. Once a tracked activity is recorded, the icon turns solid. Hover to see the exact timestamp of the open or click.

Inside Deal, Contact, or Lead Detail Views: Any tracked email activity is automatically logged in the detail view of the Pipedrive item it’s linked to. If the email’s visibility is set to Shared, your teammates with access to that deal or contact will see the tracking activity in their own views too.

Understanding the Tracking Data

Here’s what Pipedrive can and cannot tell you:

What it tells you:

• Exact time an email was opened
• How many times it was opened
• Whether any link was clicked
• Timestamp for each click event

What it cannot tell you:

• Which specific recipient opened the email (when sent to multiple people)
• Whether a forwarded version was opened (tracking only applies to original recipients)
• Opens from someone viewing the email in their own Sent folder in an external client — this can trigger a false open

The multi-recipient limitation matters. If you send to a contact list or CC’d parties, Pipedrive shows that someone opened it — but not who. For one-to-one sales outreach, this is rarely an issue.

Why Email Tracking Data Has Limitations (And What To Do About It)

Email tracking isn’t perfect — and it’s important to understand why.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), rolled out in 2021, automatically pre-loads email content for Apple Mail users, which means an “open” can be recorded even when the person never actually read the email. Since Apple Mail accounts for approximately 46% of email clients, this has significantly inflated open rate data industry-wide.

Meanwhile, certain browsers, extensions, and enterprise email security tools block tracking pixels entirely.

The practical implication: treat opens as a directional signal, not a guarantee. When you combine open data with link click data, your read becomes significantly more reliable. A prospect who opened your email and clicked your case study link is far more engaged than one showing a phantom open only.

The most accurate metric for real sales engagement remains reply rate. Industry data shows that emails with 6–8 sentences achieve the highest combination of open rate (42.67%) and reply rate (6.9%), according to a Reply.io analysis of 2.5 million cold emails. Keep your tracked emails short and purposeful.

Pipedrive Email Tracking Limitations at a Glance

Before building your entire follow-up strategy around Pipedrive’s native tracking, know its boundaries:

• Tracking is not retroactive — it cannot be applied to emails sent before you activated the setting
• It only tracks emails sent from within Pipedrive — external emails sent from your Gmail or Outlook client aren’t tracked
• It cannot identify which individual opened a group email
• Forwarded emails are not tracked beyond the original recipients
• Apple MPP and corporate security tools can produce false positives
• Email tracking is available on Advanced, Professional, and Enterprise plans only

Pro Tips to Get More From Pipedrive Email Tracking

Follow up when the iron is hot. The moment you see a notification that a prospect just opened your email, that’s your cue. Not tomorrow. Now. Research from Harvard Business Review found that following up within an hour increases success by 700% compared to longer delays.

Pay more attention to link clicks than opens. A link click signals intent — the prospect didn’t just glance at your subject line; they actively engaged with your content. If they clicked your pricing page, proposal PDF, or case study, your next follow-up should reference exactly what they viewed.

Use tracking data to refine your subject lines. When you consistently see low open rates on certain emails, it’s a subject line problem. When you see high opens but no replies, it’s a message or timing problem. Use the data to diagnose and improve, not just react.

Combine tracking with Pipedrive automations. You can build workflows in Pipedrive that trigger follow-up activities based on email engagement — for example, auto-scheduling a task to call a prospect the same day their email is opened.

Filter your inbox by tracked emails. When reviewing your pipeline, use the “Tracked Emails” filter in the Sales Inbox to quickly identify which conversations have active engagement and which haven’t moved at all.

When Native CRM Email Tracking Isn’t Enough

Pipedrive’s built-in email tracking is genuinely useful — but it’s built for managing individual conversations after you already have a prospect’s attention.

What it doesn’t solve is the harder problem: getting in front of the right people in the first place.

Cold email reply rates have dropped to 3.43% on average according to Instantly’s 2026 Benchmark Report. About 1 in 6 marketing emails never reach the inbox at all (InboxAlly). And even well-tracked outreach routinely gets buried in inboxes that receive hundreds of messages a day.

This is where most teams hit a ceiling. They optimize the tracking. They improve the follow-ups. But the pipeline stays flat because the volume of qualified conversations is too low to move the needle.

A complete outbound system changes that equation. Not just email tracking — but a full approach covering:

• Precision targeting to reach decision-makers who actually fit your ICP
• Campaign design that drives response, not just opens
• Multi-channel outreach across email, LinkedIn, and phone
• Scaling systems that build consistent pipeline month over month

That’s what Salesso does. We run done-for-you lead generation across cold email, LinkedIn outbound, and cold calling — so you’re not just tracking emails, you’re filling your calendar with qualified meetings.

Book a Strategy Meeting →

Conclusion

Activating email tracking in Pipedrive takes under two minutes. Go to Personal Preferences → Email Sync → Account, scroll to Advanced Settings, and toggle on the options you want. From that point forward, every email you send from Pipedrive becomes a two-way signal — you see when they opened it, when they clicked, and how many times they came back.

Use that data deliberately. Follow up fast. Focus on link clicks over opens. Let the engagement signal — not your calendar — drive your timing.

And if you’re ready to move beyond individual email tracking and build a full outbound system that generates consistent meetings from cold outreach, Salesso can help. We handle the targeting, the campaigns, and the scaling — so your pipeline grows whether or not you’re watching the notifications panel.

Book Your Strategy Meeting →