How should I handle email profiles with unusual high engagement rates that may be bots?
Summary
What email marketers say11Marketer opinions
Email marketer from HubSpot explains that you should analyze the source of the subscribers. If a large number of subscribers came from an unknown or suspicious source, they are more likely to be bots. Remove these subscribers to protect your sender reputation.
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests looking for purchase activity driven by email to those addresses.
Email marketer from MarketingProfs shares that you should continuously monitor email engagement metrics and update bot detection rules to stay ahead of evolving bot technologies. Regular list cleaning is essential.
Email marketer from Email Vendor Selection explains that you should monitor engagement metrics closely, and implement measures to filter out bot traffic to maintain list hygiene and avoid skewed analytics.
Email marketer from Stack Overflow mentions the importance of looking at the timing of actions such as how long it takes someone to go from receiving to opening to clicking. Normal users would have slightly different values, and bots all the same value.
Email marketer from Campaign Monitor shares that identifying and suppressing bots improves email deliverability. Techniques include monitoring engagement patterns and using advanced bot detection tools.
Email marketer from Email Geeks advises to look beyond email interactions and consider site activity. Active users on the site should be treated as active for mailing, even with odd email engagement.
Email marketer from Litmus shares that bots can skew email analytics by generating artificial opens and clicks. Implement strategies to filter out bot activity to get a more accurate view of subscriber engagement.
Email marketer from Reddit suggests to implement a honeypot trap (an email address invisible to humans but detectable by bots) to identify and filter out bot sign-ups early on.
Email marketer from Calendar advises to look for patterns like multiple clicks from the same IP address or unrealistic open times. Also, using captchas and double opt-ins can prevent bots from subscribing in the first place.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog suggests segmenting email lists to isolate and monitor highly engaged profiles, potentially bots. Analyze their behavior to identify patterns and adjust marketing strategies accordingly.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that you can identify bots by analyzing engagement patterns such as very rapid clicks or opens immediately after the email is sent. Correlate this data with other metrics to confirm bot behavior.
Expert from Email Geeks shares that high engagement rates can be from spam filters, especially in corporate/educational/government sectors, looking for malicious content, so they may be real users.
Expert from Email Geeks mentions that the clicks and opens are probably invisible to Gmail and won't help delivery. If bots are gaming the system, investigate their signup metadata (IPs, query metadata) to understand their behavior and check for similar traffic on your site, focusing on non-email bad behavior.
Expert from Spam Resource shares that implementing honeypots (email addresses not linked anywhere but present in the code) can help identify bots that scrape and sign up automatically. Any sign-ups to these addresses are clearly bots.
What the documentation says3Technical articles
Documentation from SparkPost explains that you should analyze IP addresses and user-agent strings for suspicious activity to detect and mitigate bot traffic. Implement rate limiting to prevent rapid, automated requests.
Documentation from Mailchimp explains that using double opt-in confirmation helps ensure that subscribers are genuine and not bots. This process requires new subscribers to verify their email address before being added to the list.
Documentation from Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise explains that implementing reCAPTCHA on signup forms helps distinguish between human users and bots, preventing automated accounts from skewing engagement metrics.