Are Your Email Metrics Off Because of Fake Clicks by Bots?

Email marketing experts will urge you to follow the latest and greatest best-practices: Personalize your content, send to only engaged audiences, segment whenever possible and create accurate personas, clean up your database, avoid adding contacts from purchased lists, and so on.

All that is well and good if you want to create optimized email campaigns. But what if our metrics are off because of spam bots?

More and more, marketers are calling bull on their email performance stats. From instantaneous click metrics to mismatched data between your CMS and marketing automation software/system/solution (MAS) tool, bots are running wild with email clicks. It’s becoming normal to see an email with inflated clickthrough rates that aren’t possible based on the open rate.

So how can email marketers combat that problem?

Consider the following highly tactical tips to identify whether you’re having this issue, how to catch those damn dirty bots, and what to do once you’ve found them.

First Things First: Monitor Your Sending Reputation

Let’s start off easy. Is your company a reputable sender, or have you entered the alternate universe of spammers and are no longer reaching the inbox of your desired audience? Checking your email domain reputation is a quick way to see whether your emails have the potential to reach people’s inboxes, or whether they’re getting caught by spam bots from the get-go.

Tools like Barracuda, Sender Score, Talos Intelligence, and others can give you a snapshot of your sender reputation in real-time.