Summary
In digital marketing, email campaigns serve as a cornerstone for reaching and engaging with target audiences, such as purchasers or users of your app. However, amidst the complexity of email delivery lies the challenge of spam filtering and its potential to skew campaign statistics, particularly concerning server clicks. Understanding how spam filters influence these metrics is crucial for marketers to assess campaign performance and make informed decisions accurately.
Understanding email spammer bots
An issue that you probably have heard about is the email bots that are clicking links in emails. They inflate Open Rates and Click-through Rates in the email performance reports.
Moreover, their impact on nurture campaigns and your sender reputation score is relevant, giving a “false positive” as bots clicks might appear to be hot leads, but they are not.
What are email bots and why they are available?
Email spammer bots are automated software programs designed to imitate real users by clicking on links in emails. These bots can skew analytics, affect campaign metrics, and ultimately lead to misinformed marketing decisions.
Those security email bots are designed to protect users from getting spam in their inboxes. They check whether the email content is safe by clicking on all the links in the message.
Usually education, hospitals, and government sectors are more likely to have these bots because they tend to have a higher level of data security and more spam filters. If you send emails to these sectors you are likely to experience these issues.
How do spammer bots operate?
Spammer bots are programmed to perform specific tasks such as signing up for accounts, sending emails, or clicking links. They operate at scale, often going undetected due to their ability to mimic human behavior.
When you send an email campaign it is important to get real insights about the performance, without false positives, so let’s see how to detect them in the next section.
The impact of spammer bots on email marketing
The presence of spammer bots can lead to inflated engagement metrics, compromised data integrity, and wasted resources on misdirected marketing efforts. Recognizing and mitigating their impact is crucial for maintaining the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
What are the signs that you are facing an email click bot?
First, no matter if you check once and did not find any security bot you should check regularly because you have never known when they start clicking on your links.
How can you determine if it’s a person or an email bot click?
- You sent the email and seconds after there are a huge amount of clicks in links mainly from the same company;
- You can see that the click was made before opening, or even without opening, the email;
- Signs include also rapid clicks, non-human opening times (like the middle of the night), and clicks from locations that do not match your typical customer profile.
- Metrics such as unusually high open rates or click rates that do not correlate with conversion metrics can be indicators of bot activity.
- You could add a tiny, transparent pixel image with a link in the email, which people cannot see so won’t click on it, yet a bot would. This will show the companies or domains that clicked on that pixel image that use bots;
- It is likely that bots will click on every link in the email, including social media, and the homepage, whereas a human is unlikely to do that;
- If there is no timestamp between each click in the links, it will be a bot because a person cannot open all the links at the same time.
Monitor IP Addresses: Keep an eye on the IP addresses associated with email opens and clicks. Look for suspicious patterns, such as multiple engagements originating from the same IP address or a cluster of IP addresses known for bot activity. Some filters will actually provide IP addresses linked to the datacenters so you can remove these from your actual reporting.
Preventing Email Bot Clicks
After confirming that there are bots interfering with your email marketing reports and performance, there are some practices that you should follow to reduce the consequences of bot activity.
Designing emails to discourage bots
Design emails in a way that incorporates bot-detecting traps such as invisible links or honeypots, which can help identify bot activity by tracking interactions with these hidden elements.
Using the method described above, using a tiny pixel image to identify the bots, you should remove them from your subscriber list. Then, with a smart list, you could separate those domains that have clicked in that link and other links of the email. So you can confirm with confidence that it is a spam bot.
Implementing CAPTCHA for email interactions
Introduce CAPTCHA challenges or verification steps in your signup form to reduce the likelihood of nonhuman controlled email addresses getting into your list. While this may slightly inconvenience legitimate recipients, it can significantly deter automated bots.
While not common, adding a CAPTCHA system to your email verification process can significantly reduce bot activity by adding a layer of challenge that bots cannot easily bypass
Bot clicks program
Design a program status for those bots who click on the hidden link to avoid counting them as engagement. The program status in your channels will identify those emails that clicked on the hidden link before being counted as clicks, allowing you to have real insight into your performance.
Managing subscriptions and safe sender lists
As your subscribers are the ones that have the security email bots to protect them from having spam in their inboxes, you should ask them to add you to their safe senders’ list.
In this way, your emails will get through their spam filter and land in their inbox without any problem, because you will be a trusted contact to the Email Service Provider (ESP).
Moreover, as you are in your subscriber’s safe senders’ list your content will be considered safe so the bots will stop checking them.
What tools help identify bot activities in email campaigns?
Invest in specialized bot detection tools or services designed to identify and block non-human interactions, such as eHawk. These tools often utilize advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze engagement patterns and detect bot activity accurately.
Hubspot also have a tool for those who use their service. This tool detects the bots automatically when the bot filter is turned on for your account. If the bot activity filter is not on, here’s what you can do by following these steps.
Marketo identifies bots and if you activate the filter they would not be logged in to your email campaign performance.
Moreover, Pardot had developed a tool that ignores the clicks by bots in a way that it would not inflate your rates. Finally, Marketo has a tool, Smart Campaign, that filters the humans and the bots. This filter is called “clicked the link in the email” and you can activate it when you do marketing autmation.
As you see, these companies filter bots (neither emails nor domains) based on their behavior. Obviously, it doesn’t ensure that all the bots are going to be excluded but the majority of them will be.
Unsubscribed list
As the bots will click on all the links of the email, they click on the “unsubscribe” link too. To avoid removing a contact from your list that you want to keep, give them two steps to opt-out. Firstly, the visible link in an email, and then ask if they really want to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
In this way, you will ensure that it is a person who is unsubscribing and not a false click from a bot.
If you still need help to exclude bots from harming your email deliverability, and negatively affecting the performance of your email campaigns, MailSoar is here to help you. Our team of experts is used to managing the ongoing deliverability of massive senders from all industries.
While spam filters are crucial in safeguarding email users from unwanted or malicious content, their filtering activity can influence email campaign statistics, particularly concerning server clicks.
You can find out what clicks are more likely to be non-human following the tips above. Lastly, I would personally recommend not worrying about them, especially in B2B it’s normal and expected. While I understand the need to segment them out of your reports, do not fall for micromanaging your open and click rates based on bots, it could harm you more than anything else.
If you still need help to exclude bots from harming your email deliverability, and negatively affecting the performance of your email campaigns, MailSoar is here to help you. Our team of experts is used to managing the ongoing deliverability of massive senders from all industries.
