Email Bots: Are Click Bots Bad For Your Marketing Campaign?

A high click-through rate (CTR) is everything in marketing. An email marketing campaign with a high CTR indicates that your strategy has effectively engaged your target audience. 

But what happens when that click data isn’t accurate?

This is where email click bots come in. Email bot clicks can account for over 20% of your total clicks if you’re not filtering them correctly. Many of these clicks come from sophisticated anti-spam bots that will only grow in popularity as time goes on. Find out why you should filter these clicks with this Coalition Technologies guide.

What Are Email Bots?

These bots are automated programs designed to protect users from malware and spam. You might have already heard about X-headers or SpamAssassin logs and how they’re used to track spam filtering. SpamAssassin is a program that grades emails based on their likelihood of being spam—a spam score. 

These automated email programs work very similarly. They mimic human behavior by clicking on links, inflating the CTR of email campaigns. While seemingly harmless, these bots are often employed to manipulate data and create a false sense of engagement. This practice can be detrimental to both individuals and businesses alike.

The Danger of Inflated Metrics

Email bots can turn your best indicator of engagement–CTR–into a bundle of false positives. Click bots can:

Mislead Businesses	Misallocate Resources	Diminish ROI
Misleading CTRs can lead businesses to believe that specific audience segments are more engaged than they are. Bots can result in targeting efforts that are misaligned with the audience’s true interests, decreasing campaign effectiveness and wasting marketing dollars.	Businesses might pour resources into strategies that appear successful based on inflated CTRs, only to discover later that the results were fabricated. This can lead to wasted budgets and missed investment opportunities in effective tactics.	Failing to filter results against email bots can turn one of the highest ROI marketing channels into one of the lowest by hindering a business’s ability to optimize its strategy on time.

Trigger-Based Automation

Bots don’t just affect your campaign metrics with incorrect click data. They can also impact trigger-based marketing automation. Many email marketers rely on trigger-based automation, where specific actions like clicks or opens trigger subsequent emails or actions. This automation creates personalized and dynamic customer journeys, delivering relevant content based on individual behavior. 

However, bots can completely disrupt this delicate balance.

Consider a Black Friday campaign’s introductory email with a ‘Learn More’ button at the bottom, triggering a follow-up email with more detailed information if pressed. If that click came from an email bot, the user will receive a follow-up to an email they never even opened. Click bots can generate a surge of irrelevant emails, prompting users to unsubscribe from your list. 

The Role of ESPs

Anti-spam bots might sound alarming, but they’re perfectly normal. Metrics like the spam score are good things, created to protect you and your customers from bad actors. Every newsletter, including yours, will be impacted by email click bots.

Email service providers (ESPs) recognize the importance of these bots. According to one central ESP’s estimate, 63% of all their clicks come from bots. Providers like Marketo and Mailchimp actively allow email bot clicks since they’re incredibly effective in fighting spam. 

So what’s the problem?

The issue arises when the number of artificial clicks surpasses human clicks. It’s a sign that something in your emails is triggering email bots. This could indicate: 

• Lack of Engaging Content: Bots often click on links regardless of content, but compelling subject lines draw in actual users. If bot clicks dominate, it suggests your subject lines are bland or misleading, ultimately failing to pique genuine interest.
  
  The same can be said of content. Bots don’t understand context, but humans do. If your email content is consistently irrelevant to your target audience, they’ll stop clicking. Click bot dominance might indicate you’re not tailoring your message to the right people.
  
• Poor Management: Great email marketers know best practices like monitoring SpamAssassin logs and using X-headers for DMARC authentication. If your emails attract a lot of email bot attention, they could appear suspicious and go straight to spam.
  
  This can happen when businesses buy email lists. Purchased lists often include invalid or inactive addresses, prime targets for bots. High bot clicks may signal you rely on low-quality lists instead of building a genuine subscriber base. You should also take the time to remove inactive addresses that may have accumulated over time in your genuine email lists. 

If your click data looks suspicious, adjustments need to be made immediately. You can spot this click discrepancy by comparing your ESP’s metrics with Google Analytics or another third-party tool. 

Impact on Regulated Industries vs. Personal Email

Email click bots pose unique challenges for different sectors, with regulated industries facing a far greater degree of scrutiny and potential repercussions than personal email users.

Let’s take a look at how improper filtering of clicks from email bots can affect regulated industries:

• Scrutiny: Regulatory bodies are increasingly vigilant about data integrity and may investigate businesses suspected of using click bots to manipulate engagement metrics (like CTR.) These investigations can be costly and time-consuming, potentially leading to further legal action.
  
• Compliance: Many regulations like HIPAA (for healthcare industries) contain strict data reporting and collection requirements.
  
• Reputation: Misleading metrics can erode public trust and damage the reputation of regulated businesses, especially if they are caught manipulating data. This can lead to decreased consumer confidence and potential loss of business.

Personal emails are less regulated regarding email bots, but the consequences of carelessness can be just as expensive for businesses. A deluge of unwanted follow-up emails caused by automatic triggers will impact your bottom line, and recouping those lost subscribers could be nearly impossible. 

Reducing Bot Clicks

Now that we know why clean click data is so important, we can discuss some best practices for reducing excess email bot clicks. 

• Keep a Clean List: A clean email list is the foundation of any email marketing strategy. You’ll want to remove inactive addresses that contribute to bot clicks. Focus on subscribers who actively engage with your emails, open and click on links, and demonstrate genuine interest. You’ll also want to keep opt-in subscribers who might not be active but have consented to receive your emails.
  
• Use Segmentation Tools: Your email marketing platform should include features to help you identify clicks from email bots. For example, you can filter out clicks from the same IP address. Click bots sometimes also use the same email domain to inflate clicks. You can filter these spam bots out using the same tool.
  
• Monitor and Observe: You’ll need a keen eye to filter suspicious behavior. This is similar to how you might monitor SpamAssassin logs to analyze incoming emails and their spam scores.
  
  Look for clicks that occur in rapid succession. A human who clicks on your email will take time to read it properly before clicking on a link. An email bot, on the other hand, will click it instantly. You can filter out bot behavior by watching for these tendencies.
  
• Invisible Link: Add an invisible link to your emails to quickly identify bots. You can then remove any addresses that clicked on the link from your list.
  
• Third-Party Cleaning: Nothing gets the bots out like a third-party list cleaning service. Ask a trusted service provider to help you scrub your email list. They’ll be able to identify and remove spam traps and inactive subscribers who have not engaged with your content in a while. 

Beat The Click Bots

As a business, you can monitor only so many variables on your own. Expert guidance goes a long way in countering email bots and boosting your marketing campaign performance. From using x-headers to track email metrics to crafting data-driven strategies to increase sales, Coalition Technologies has been pushing the boundaries of email marketing for nearly 15 years. 

We’ve helped hundreds of clients generate millions in revenue with our email campaigns, and we’d love to create one for you. Contact us for a free consultation today.