Email open rates have long been a key measure of engagement, but the rise of bots is complicating things. Bots, designed to interact with emails for security reasons, can inflate open rates, distorting campaign data and providing a false picture of success.
Mailchimp warns that “spam filters can cause your open rates to be too high”—meaning bots are skewing your data and giving a false perception of open rates.
What Are Bots in Email Marketing?
Bots are automated programs that scan emails for security threats like phishing or malware. While they play an important role in protecting inboxes, they can also falsely inflate open rates. They often trigger open rate tracking pixels, giving the impression that an email has been opened by a human when it hasn’t.
Why Is This a Problem?
Inflated open rates create a false sense of success, making it harder to evaluate the true effectiveness of your email campaigns. This can hinder improvements and mislead you about your audience’s engagement. They can also throw off the following numbers:
- False Positives: Bots may scan emails, making it appear that they’ve been opened when no human has interacted with them.
- Skewed A/B Testing: Bot interactions can distort the data you rely on for making decisions about subject lines, email content, and other elements.
- Inaccurate Segmentation: Bots can cause you to misclassify recipients as “engaged,” leading to ineffective segmentation.
How to Spot Bot Activity
It can be difficult to identify bot activity versus human activity. However, there are some key signs that you can look for, such as:
- High Open Rates: Sudden spikes in open rates may indicate bot interference.
- Short Open Times: Bots often scan emails in fractions of a second.
- Corporate Domain Opens: Many corporate email systems use bots to scan emails, which can inflate open rates from these addresses.
Minimizing Bot Impact
While bots are here to stay, you can take steps to reduce their influence on your open rates with these best practices.
- Focus on Click Rates: Clicks are a stronger indicator of human engagement.
- Watch for Anomalies: Unusually high open rates combined with low click-through rates may signal bot activity.
- Use Bot Filters: Email service providers like Zoho offer tools to filter out bot activity, giving you cleaner data.
- Look Beyond Open Rates: Instead of relying solely on open rates, consider click-through rates, conversions, and ROI for a more accurate picture of performance.
Some email solution products also offer bot filtering solutions, including these programs:
- ActiveCampaign How to filter suspected bot clicks
- Amazon SES How to detect and block bot traffic
- Campaign Monitor Enable the non-human click filter
- Constant Contact Email engagement bot filter
- HubSpot Filter bot activity from known internet bots
- Klaviyo How to identify email bot clicks
- Mailgun Bot detection feature
The Future of Open Rate Tracking
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, bots are an unavoidable presence in email marketing, but they don’t have to derail your strategy. By understanding how bots impact your open rates and focusing on more reliable engagement metrics, you can reclaim control of your campaigns.
It’s not just about who opens your emails—it’s about who truly engages with them. Stay proactive, leverage bot-filtering tools, and keep your finger on the pulse of real audience interactions to drive meaningful results and lasting success in your email marketing efforts.