How do bot signups impact email deliverability and what methods can prevent them?
Summary
What email marketers say15Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Campaign Monitor recommends gradually warming up new IPs by sending emails in increasing volumes to engaged subscribers. This helps establish a positive sending reputation with ISPs and improves deliverability.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that bot signups can have a huge impact on deliverability, depending on the ratio of bot accounts to genuinely engaged users. The impact might not be immediately apparent, and it could take time before the accumulation of illegitimate addresses is noticed.
Email marketer from Litmus discusses the importance of regular list cleaning. Removing unengaged subscribers and bot signups improves engagement rates and prevents spam complaints, positively affecting deliverability.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum suggests using honeypots, which are hidden form fields that only bots will fill out. If these fields are populated, the submission is flagged as a bot and rejected.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that when a site is botted, you are sending to a mixture of addresses that bounce, accept mail but the recipient didn't actually sign up (resulting in spam reports or lack of engagement), and potentially spam traps.
Email marketer from Mailjet recommends implementing CAPTCHA to prevent automated signups. CAPTCHA helps differentiate between human users and bots, blocking the latter from subscribing.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce shares using email validation tools to identify and remove invalid or risky email addresses before sending emails. This prevents sending emails to bot-generated addresses, improving deliverability.
Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that bot signups often result in spam complaints. These complaints directly damage your sender reputation, causing emails to land in the spam folder more often.
Email marketer from HubSpot recommends monitoring signup sources to identify suspicious patterns, like sudden spikes in signups from unknown sources. This helps in detecting and addressing potential bot activity.
Email marketer from ActiveCampaign recommends using confirmed opt-in to avoid bot signups. By requiring subscribers to click a link in a confirmation email, it ensures that the email address is valid and owned by a real person.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog explains that bot signups lead to a lower sender reputation. A high bounce rate (due to fake email addresses) signals to ISPs that you're not maintaining a clean list, impacting deliverability.
Email marketer from MailerLite advises segmenting email lists based on engagement. Sending targeted emails to engaged subscribers and separate campaigns to those who are less active can help maintain a healthy sender reputation and improve deliverability.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares if you’re using a competent ESP’s built in forms they should be doing bot detection and rejection for you automatically.
Email marketer from Reddit user u/EmailGuru emphasizes the importance of double opt-in. This method requires users to confirm their subscription via email, ensuring that only legitimate users are added to the list, preventing bot signups effectively.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that reCAPTCHA determines if the input is coming from a human, while lead validation software checks whether the input value is valid or suspect. He continues to explain that both are useful as valid addresses can be entered maliciously, and invalid addresses can be entered accidentally.
What the experts say3Expert opinions
Expert from Spam Resource responds by sharing that high rates of bot signups damage sender reputation because they lead to increased spam complaints and low engagement, which ISPs interpret as signs of spamming practices and subsequently hurt email deliverability.
Expert from Word to the Wise shares that implementing a double opt-in process can help verify the authenticity of new subscribers, ensuring only genuine users are added to the mailing list and improving deliverability rates by reducing bot signups.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that using a combination of honeypots (hidden form fields) and CAPTCHAs on signup forms helps to significantly reduce bot signups by identifying and blocking automated submissions.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from Cloudflare shares Cloudflare's bot management tools provide advanced bot detection and mitigation techniques. This service can identify and block malicious bots attempting to sign up for email lists.
Documentation from Microsoft explains maintaining a positive sender reputation which is key for deliverability. Bot signups harm sender reputation due to bounces and spam complaints.
Documentation from Google reCAPTCHA explains that reCAPTCHA analyzes user behavior to determine if a user is a bot. It uses advanced risk analysis techniques to protect websites from fraudulent activities such as spam and abuse.
Documentation from OWASP explains that account creation should be secured from automated bots to protect user data and system resources. They advise rate limiting to slow down bot attacks.