The Open Rate of Your Newsletter is a Complete Lie: Discover the Truth

You spent hours fine-tuning your latest newsletter.

You crafted engaging content, designed an attractive layout, and carefully segmented your mailing list.

And then, you hit the "Send" button.

You eagerly await to see the results of your hard work.

Open and click-through rates start pouring in, and you feel satisfied.

But hold on a minute... What if those numbers are deceiving?

Yes, you read that right. The open and click-through rates you see might just be a complete lie.

This isn't a tasteless joke or an attempt to discourage you.

It's the harsh reality of the email marketing industry today.

In this article, we will uncover the truth behind those numbers.

We will explore how and why your open and click-through rates can be inflated by factors you may not have considered.

Get ready for a revelation that might just change how you perceive your newsletters.

Part 1: The Hidden Culprits Behind Your Open and Click Rates and How They Operate

It's time to unveil the culprits lurking behind your open and click rates. You might think that every open and click comes from an interested human reader, but the reality could be quite different.

1. Bots: These automated programs are everywhere on the web, and they can also infiltrate your inbox. They are capable of "opening" your emails and "clicking" on your links, artificially inflating your statistics. Their presence can give a false impression of reader engagement. Moreover, some bots may click on every link in your email, even non-essential ones like links to your homepage or social media accounts.
2. Mobile device notifications: When an email arrives in a user's inbox, their mobile device may display a notification. This notification can trigger the email to be counted as opened, even if the user didn't actually open it. This can give a false impression of reader engagement.
3. Antivirus software: To protect users from potential threats, some antivirus software "opens" emails and "clicks" on all the links to ensure they are safe. This can result in a significant increase in your open and click rates.

To illustrate how these factors can combine to distort your statistics, let's consider a simple example of an email sent to a user:

• The user receives an email from you in their Gmail account.
• Google's proxy service downloads the image and triggers an open.
• The user's iPhone displays an iOS notification from Gmail, triggering another open.
• The user goes to their work PC equipped with antivirus software.
• They open Microsoft Outlook, which scans emails for viruses.
• A click is triggered for each link in your email.

Understanding these factors is crucial for accurately evaluating the success of your newsletter.

Part 2: Practical Tips to Mitigate the Impact of Bots on Your Newsletters

Identifying Bot Clicks in Email

We have worked with many marketing professionals to develop strategies for identifying bot clicks in their data. While the exact strategies may vary, most effective bot filtering methods boil down to two steps:

1. Identifying suspicious activities.
2. Excluding the responsible user (bot) from your tracking.

Examples of suspicious activities may include:

• Clicking on all links in an email.
• Clicking on two links within less than 100 ms.
• Clicking on an email immediately after it is delivered.
• Clicking on an email before it is marked as opened.

This method will have some margin of error, especially as businesses develop increasingly sophisticated bots that mimic human behavior more closely.

Regardless of your strategy, you will inevitably miss some bots, and there is a risk of mistakenly excluding some genuine users.

Therefore, it is crucial to exercise caution when using these techniques.

Filtering and Removing Email Bots

If your mailing list is plagued with excessive bot clicks, it generally indicates that:

1. Real people are not engaging with your newsletter. It could be considered spam, or you may have a list health issue.
2. Your emails appear suspicious, attracting significant bot attention. You may be blacklisted by email providers.

Here are some strategies to address the problem within your Email Service Provider (ESP):

1.Maintain a clean list with only active and consented subscribers.

2.Use the segmentation tool in your email program to filter bot-like behaviors:

• Filter multiple clicks from the same IP address.
• Filter duplicate clicks from the same email domain.
• Filter suspicious behaviors. For example, experts suggest that bots often click on the first link in your newsletter (often the "View in Browser" link) within 1-5 minutes of sending.

3.Look for patterns in your mailing list. Sometimes, bot addresses will have similar sequences of letters or numbers, making it easier to identify and filter them.

4.Run your list through a third-party email verification tool to validate genuine email addresses.

5.Periodically engage a third-party list cleaning service to scrub your list and keep it up to date.

6.Launch a list pruning campaign to improve the health of your list.

It's important to remain vigilant in filtering your list for hyperactive bots. It requires extra work, but it's worth it to share more accurate performance data with your teams.

Filtering bot clicks is challenging, but it's worth it!

There is no foolproof way to filter out all bot activity from your data, but you should be able to make a significant difference with the processes and tools outlined in this article. And you don't have to navigate this issue alone. At Tequila Sunrise, we are constantly researching new methods to identify bots and filter out fake clicks from your marketing campaigns.

If you're experiencing abnormally high bot activity in your campaigns, don't hesitate to seek help and work with experts to address the issue and achieve more accurate results.

From our experience, Mailjet, Mailchimp, Sarbacane, and similar tools do not offer in-depth analysis of bot behavior. It's unfortunate, but they are among those tools that prefer to hide the truth and inflate your stats.

Instead, consider using tools like Paved, Bento, or Yespo, which make this analysis possible. These tools provide more transparency and help you better understand the true engagement and performance of your campaigns.

Conclusion

I hope this article has opened your eyes to the importance of understanding the metrics of your newsletters and how bots can distort this data. You now have concrete strategies to identify suspicious activities, filter out bots, and obtain more accurate data on your subscribers' engagement.

It is crucial to remember that behind every statistic, there are real people. And to reach those people, you need to ensure that your data is as accurate as possible.

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Thank you for reading, and feel free to share this article with your colleagues and friends who may also benefit from it.

Together, we can turn challenges into opportunities and make the marketing world a little less frustrating.

And now, I'm off to the beach. Cheers! ??