The Rise of Bots: The Uninvited +1s to Your Email Metrics 🤖

You may have seen a lot of discussion around these "gosh darn bots" impacting email metrics lately. If you’ve seen emails marked as opened or links clicked within seconds of delivery, often at the exact same minute, you’re likely witnessing the handiwork of bots.

Auto-Opens: The New Norm (sigh) 🙄

When Apple Mail implemented auto-opens, it created a ripple effect throughout the industry and in nicer terms let’s say, it "agitated" 🙃 a lot of marketeers in the process.

Today, this practice is not just limited to Apple—it’s increasingly common with business email addresses, where auto-opens are used as an extra security measure to scan email for malicious content.

***Stay tuned for a future Vero feature that tackles this in your metrics!

Auto-Clicks: The Ultimate Buzzkill 🥱

Bots don’t just stop at opening emails—they’re also clicking through them, a phenomenon known as bot clicks or nonhuman interaction (NHI)🤖. While these clicks can make your emails seem highly successful, there’s nothing more upsetting than finding out that that very silly capybara gif you included in your last newsletter did not actually lead to a 60% real click rate.

But it’s not just metrics that are impacted, bots can also interfere with:

• 👎 Unsubscribe Rates: Bots can inadvertently trigger unsubscribes, leading to higher-than-normal unsubscribe rates. This isn’t just a numbers game—it means losing subscribers who never intended to opt out in the first place. See how Vero has solved this for you!
• 👎 Erroneous A/B Testing: If you’re running A/B tests, bot activity can skew your results, making it difficult to determine which variation truly resonated with your audience. This unreliable data can lead to misguided decisions about your email strategy.
• 👎 Bot-Triggered Automated Journeys: Many email marketing platforms use triggers to initiate automated messaging journeys. Bots can falsely trigger these journeys, sending unintended follow-ups and disrupting the flow of your campaigns.
• 👎 Misleading CTA Clicks: Bots can accidentally click on CTA buttons, leading to unintended actions like confirming reservations or submitting forms—actions that were never meant to happen.

Keeping the Bots at Bay💡

To tackle those pesky bot clicks and keep your metrics (and your sanity) 🤯 in check, try these strategies:

• ✅ Maintain a High-Quality List: Regularly update your list to ensure it contains only active, engaged subscribers who have opted in. This reduces the chances of bots lurking among your audience.
• ✅ Deploy Invisible Links: Hide a link in your emails just for the bots. If they click, you’ll know exactly who’s been sneaking around and will allow you to identify and remove bot-driven email addresses from your list.
• ✅ Add Additional Steps: If you have a CTA (call to action) button in your email, make sure it leads to a landing page which asks the user to perform an additional action, like a "confirm" (for engineers- must be POST) button.
• ✅ Maintain Consistent Sending Patterns: Keep your sending patterns steady. If you’re constantly changing, bots will just keep clicking to keep up. Bots are designed to learn your behavior, so changing your sending patterns frequently will only prompt them to keep clicking, further distorting your metrics.
• ✅ Identify Patterns in Subscriber Emails: Look for repetitive patterns in your subscriber email addresses. Bots often use similar sequences of letters or numbers, making them easier to spot and filter out. Don’t forget to secure your sign-up forms!
• ✅ Use HTTPS for All Links: Ensure all your links are HTTPS. This keeps your emails safer and less appealing to bots looking for easy targets.
• ✅ Prune Your List Regularly: Conduct campaigns to weed out inactive subscribers who no longer engage with your emails. These inactive addresses not only skew your metrics but can also harm your sender reputation, bounce rates, and overall email deliverability.
• ✅ Use Third-Party Email Verification: Periodically run your list through an email verification tool or hire a third-party service to clean your list. This helps validate genuine email addresses and remove any suspicious ones.

Looking Ahead: Bots Aren’t Going Anywhere 🔮

Unfortunately, just like the Kardashians, we have to accept that bot clicks are going to continue to stick around. As major providers like Yahoo and Google introduce new authentication requirements, we’re likely to see even more security measures that could trigger bot interactions. Staying proactive and using the strategies above will help you manage your metrics more effectively and save us all from yet another robot-takeover film being released (god I wish) 🤞.

📆 At Vero, we’re committed to staying ahead of these trends. Keep an eye out for our upcoming features designed to help you tackle bot-related challenges head-on.